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Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

One major problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.

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The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.

Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way.

It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.

In the context of "reducing friction" to improve conversion from click-through advertising it's not unexpected that making it easier to retweet results in more people retweeting stuff without thinking it through.

I distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system.

There's a really solvable answer to that, though: ban people who do it. Enforce some controls on your platform.

But the search for more money continues...

I don't actually believe that, though. I think they're confusing the effects that rapid growth and their own cowardice in refusing to slow that growth by kicking bad actors off the platform had with the effects of adding a button to do what users were doing already.

Didn't the button appear in most third party clients long before?

> The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.

Did he? Twitter clients already had one-click retweet functionality by the time Twitter subsumed/operationalized it, IIRC.

I think I understand that argument, but I'm not convinced that it's really all that true or that the actual button being added to Twitter was all that consequential.

Is a manual task like copy/paste and writing quotemarks really enough "friction" to reduce what seems like a pretty natural human drive on social media? Would doing it over and over again not make it just as "automatic" as a single button push for power users, even if it's not as convenient?

We also don't have the benefit of looking at the counterfactual situation where the retweet button wasn't implemented.

Maybe keeping manual retweeting would just result in a worse kind of "dunking" that had the extra dynamic of the retweeters subtly tweaking the wording of the quoted tweet.

Besides, if Twitter didn't implement the retweet button then the hoards of 3rd-party apps or some Twitter alternative probably would anyway.

The article says Twitter saw a lot more retweeting after implementing the button. (“After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. “It did a lot of what it was designed to do,” he said. “It had a force multiplier that other things didn’t have.”)

It seems like they saw an immediate change in behavior and results, enough to conclude the button directly affected behavior. My anecdotal experience was similar. Though I agree we will never know how effective would have been the third party tools or how much the delay in third-vs-first-party development would have affected Twitter’s growth.

"weaponized it" This is foolish language to use. A retweets is actually super helpful and provides value. However, like with all tools, it matters what you use it for.

These days it seems like most people forget that there is a Twitter that exist outside politics. There are lots of communities on Twitter that provides tremendous value to those who are part of them.

> what you use it for

In some cases it makes it easier to cause harm, so weaponize seems appropriate (turning a non-weapon into a weapon)...

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