As if on cue to my rant about social media, twitter is insisting on making themselves into Facebook. Social media is perpetually moving toward becoming a homogenous blob. They may begin with a specific, innovative purpose but eventually they all start becoming like whatever is most popular at the time.
I know this must make some business sense for economic reasons beyond my grasp, but it doesn't seem to be logical. Whenever a social media outlet changes into another one, I tend to quit using one of them. If twitter becomes a replica of my Facebook feed, goodbye twitter. Maybe most people don't think this way and continue with both of them, but I doubt it.
The article even acknowledges twitter's reluctance to alienate its current users, but it desires to suck up gigabytes on previously #twitterless people. However, I don't see "being more like facebook" as a draw for those people. But again, I'm no expert.
I'm sure some new, Yik Yaky thing will come around to replace twitter's place while it makes itself irrelevant (looking at you, myspace).
But all the changes also make me sad on some weirder, emotional level. Whenever they update, you lose all of the old posts and pictures and things. Growing up when I did, all my high school days and now my college ones are digitally preserved. With every money-grubbing update, I lose a bit of those records. I guess I could go around taking screenshots of them all, but who thinks about doing that?
In my medieval literature class, we talk about how little is preserved of that time because all the flimsy or poorly kept records have disintegrated with time. Maybe our digital age is a new version of that, and peoples of the future will have to study us on flickering, dusty screens what remains from the latest updates on our twitter accounts.
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