Twitter Doesn’t Owe You Anything

Yesterday, Twitter made another in an ongoing series of ill-advised changes to their user experience, this one having to do with conversations. They cited user confusion as justification. In other words, it was All For Your Own Good.

Chaos erupted.

Twitter responded by explaining that No, We Meant Our Own Good, Because Writing Code Is Hard and no one fell for it. (How can just showing everything be harder or less scalable than filtering replies based on relationships?)

Regardless.

Here are some things to think about:

• Twitter doesn’t owe you an explanation.
• Twitter doesn’t owe you the truth.
• Twitter doesn’t even owe you Twitter.

This gets at, I think, the dirty secret at the center of our little community. The relationships we form here seem as real as anything, but we forget how dependent they are on transitory fragments of data maintained by a company that has so far displayed zero revenue and about the same level of engineering competence. And if Twitter disappeared tomorrow, what could any of us do? We couldn’t even demand our money back.

What I’m trying to say is this: Back up your friendships. If there are people you care about but you only “know” them on Twitter or Tumblr or whatever, make contact in other ways as well. Learn their real names. Share email addresses. What the hell, even friend them on Facebook. (Here’s mine. I’m not proud.)

But whatever you do, don’t let this thing we have die just because its caretakers couldn’t keep the lights on.