Twitter has come under very heavy criticism over the past couple of years. This is due in large part to the amount of hate and negativity that are contained in the tweets that are sent out by Twitter users. Many people and groups have been banned from Twitter recently in an attempt by the company to prevent the amount of hate speech. However, many regular users of the social media service believe that nothing much has changed.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been working hard on this issue. He has developed a prototype app for Twitter that made its debut at SXSW. This is a large gathering that is held in Austin, Texas, every year where many tech companies debut their products which will soon be released. In the case of Twitter, they were showing a prototype of a possible new version of Twitter. The prototype app is called “twttr.” The biggest change that the app makes to the regular Twitter service is the removal of the numbers that indicate how many likes and retweets a tweet has received. To be clear, the numbers are not completely removed. They are still there. However, they are not able to be seen when you are looking at a specific tweet’s replies. You will need to tap on a specific reply to find out how many times it has been liked or retweeted. This will make it impossible to find out this info by quickly scrolling down the list of replies.
These changes might never be implemented in the regular Twitter service. The company is just exploring many options in the new prototype. One of the features that Twitter is going to add to their service is a new camera that is an upgrade from their old one. It is not known why Twitter would consider concealing the like and retweet numbers. People are baffled to see the benefit in doing it. Dorsey would not say when a decision will be made concerning which aspects of the prototype will be implemented and forced to be used by Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users.
The early reaction to the proposed changes has been overwhelmingly negative. Twitter users like to be able to see how many times a tweet has been liked and retweeted without the annoyance of having to click on it. Will Jack Dorsey take the public’s opinions into consideration? Only time will tell.
Dil Bole Oberoi
