How to solve the problem of Twitter information flow filtering

According to foreign media reports, Twitter's information flow is unfiltered, making users drown in a sea of ​​information. This will lead to fewer and fewer connections between users, hindering the development of Twitter. Twitter should launch a button tool to make it easier for users to unfollow information and recommend content that users really care about.

According to the report, on Twitter, every tweet you post will be displayed to your followers. This makes Twitter very much like the real-time pulse of the world, but this will also hinder the development of Twitter. If you follow too many people, you will lose the opportunity to be discovered and drown in the ocean of information.

Imagine you have just joined Twitter and you follow a few friends, acquaintances, well-known media or celebrities you are interested in. Your unfiltered feed starts to grow and you get updates every minute on what your acquaintances are doing. Although there are not as many tweets in your stream, you still miss the news that you care about most.

Then you follow more people. You discover more acquaintances and colleagues on Twitter. You subscribe to a news feed service of experts in certain fields or follow the author because the news forwarded by a friend is interesting. Sometimes, you follow others out of courtesy. Gradually, your feed information begins to become chaotic. Several accounts send more than a dozen messages a day, completely drowning out the messages of others. Twitter is a stream of information, not a queue, so you don't have to read every message. But even so, you find yourself missing a lot of interesting things that close friends occasionally update, interesting links, etc. This is exactly the problem with Twitter's business.

You can live with all that information but lose a good user experience. If you have the skills, you can create a list of people to follow, but it's a lot of work. For most people who want to streamline their list of people to follow, they don't know where to start.

Twitter keeps suggesting that people follow more people, but doesn't tell users who they have never contacted and who they shouldn't follow. Removing a follower requires multiple operations, and it's difficult to get rid of 10 accounts, let alone hundreds.

Following too many people will lead to two consequences: users will visit less frequently and will stop following new people.

In the first case, users’ ad clicks decrease, the amount of forwarded messages also decreases, and the number of active users shrinks accordingly.

In the second case, the friends and acquaintances you follow lose their audience. No one wants to talk to a dead account, and after a few days, weeks, and months, these people will give up. There is no shortage of zombie accounts on Twitter.

Reports say Twitter has more than 1 billion registered users, but Twitter officially confirms only 218 million active users. This ratio inhibits Twitter's ability to achieve profitability.

Worse, people who abandon Twitter or barely log on are likely to embrace Facebook. Facebook’s audience can comment on posts. Users don’t have to be “thought leaders” to compete for followers. They gather friends through interesting stories in their lives, not a competition to see who has the most followers.

Even so, Facebook’s feed is filtered, limiting the number of friends you have and the pages you have liked. Rather than just throwing unfiltered information at you, Facebook shows you only the best posts — the ones that get the most likes and comments.

Although Facebook is not as real-time as Twitter, it ensures that the information fed to users is valuable. The filtering function is done automatically, and users are given direct control over the type of information and the frequency with which their friends' information appears.

The problem of information filtering is not unique to Twitter. Instagram will eventually face this dilemma, but it is still young and its information flow is full of beautiful photos, which is not easily disturbed by spam. In short, it is a difficult task for users to manage their own information flow, and Twitter needs to come up with innovative information management methods to ensure sustainable growth.

Of course, an unfiltered feed is the cornerstone of the user experience. Filtering aside, we can solve the information flow problem in other ways.

Twitter wants to allow users to build more connections in the "interest graph", which will help it to place ads. But it should allow users to easily unfollow the objects they follow.

First, a follow-and-remove button could be added. Or, even more aggressively, Twitter could analyze people you never interact with and suggest you unfriend them with a single button.

Twitter could also offer a stream-cleaning button that rates the people you follow based on your engagement, making it easier to unfriend people you’ve never interacted with, and it should be easy to use on mobile devices, where most Twitter users use the service.

If Twitter doesn't address these issues, it will face growth challenges.