Managing Participation through Modal Affordances on Twitter

What is it about?

This is about how the "automatic retweet" function, built into Twitter by the developers, changed the practices of users of Twitter. Rather than moving wholesale to the new function, users continued to use the "manual retweet" created by the community in conjunction with the new automatic function, and for different purposes. We suggest that users are sensitive to things like who the original author of the tweet is, and who disseminated the tweet widely, and use this sense of authorship and attribution to decide which kind of retweet to use.

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Why is it important?

This article shows how a change to an online platform made by a developer can impact a community of users in unexpected ways. We're not sure if Twitter intended their "automatic retweet" to replace the users' retweeting behavior, but what resulted was a system of retweeting that incorporated both. This paper adds evidence to the idea that users prefer the mechanisms created by the community and sometimes developer intervention does not work out as planned.

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