If you are an ardent Twitter user, you may feel appalled and maybe even sympathetic for the wide range of criticism it receives. The platform has time and again been subjected to criticism for its inability to deal with the abuse and for being complicit about it. However, with the advent of 2017, Twitter, much to the relief of the users has introduced many new features including blocking options, content filters and reporting tools to tackle the issue.
Amidst all the appreciation for addressing the user problem, recently, the platform once again came under the hammer as it announced that they would replace the existing default egg avatar with the greyed out human icon, which Twitter felt would encourage users to upload their real/actual picture.
One must understand that we cannot nonchalantly slam them for trying out something new. Considering, they are such a huge global organisation; they must have done their research and also thought of the repercussions of their actions. May be analysis suggested that it would have a more significant impact than an ordinary user could think of. So in a nutshell, I, feel we should give due credit to Twitter for trying something new.
Another recent change introduced by Twitter was the way replies are displayed on the app. The @handles are excluded from the character limit, which is pretty cool but what it spoilt for me is the way how the list of people added to the conversation is displayed like e-mail recipients above the tweet content.
The change brought an outrageous response from the users with many people claiming, the platform is creating an unnecessary and confusing mess. As minute change as it may seem, it has triggered a massive shift in the way people look at the platform. Several outraged users announced that they have had enough of the platform and that they are moving to an alternative platform, Mastodon, which is quite simple. How Twitter tackles these issues remains to be seen, but for now, Mastodon has seen almost 73% increase in their users, since Twitter implement the reply change.
While the massive shift of the user base is not likely to be a key concern for Twitter, it is the underlying discontent among the users that Twitter would be keen to address soon. Whether they stick to their changes and hope the negative sentiments are reversed once all the changes are seamlessly embedded or will it roll back the changes, will be quite interesting to see.
