Think Bigger

Last week BuzzFeed wrote up an interview with Chris Wetherell, the man who headed a team that wrote the code behind the "retweet" button on Twitter. He now regrets it and says he had misgivings about the idea even when he was developing the feature.

For those who, like me, ignore as much of Twitter as possible, the retweet button is a shortcut replacing the acts of copying and pasting the old tweet and it's poster's handle into a tweet of your own. Instead of doing those things, users can now send along a tweet along to as many people as they want with a single program feature. The button allows groups to coordinate their approval or disapproval of a tweet much more quickly. It was instrumental in the development of Twitter mobs, which can spread a mistaken or objectionable tweet to thousands of people almost at once, letting them do the same or response en masse to the original poster.

Wetherell sees the feature he created as part of the problem with modern social media because it lessons even the briefest of delays between offense and response. It allows the most passionate and devoted users to drive conversations far beyond their actual number and impact -- just more than 2 percent of the US population drives about 80 percent of Twitter traffic. What's left is a simulacra of real political dialogue and discourse. Sure, it has differing viewpoints, expressed by the people who hold them, but it has almost no reasoned or elaborated response to them. There's no conversation, just mutual antagonistic shouting.

Wetherell is partly right: The retweet feature has caused a lot of the problems prominent in social media. But only partly, because the actual truth is that much of the damage can be laid at the feet of Twitter itself. The platform, whose small character limit prohibits the deployment of developed thoughts or considered opinions, has always rewarded snark over substance. All the retweet button does is make the awful worse.