Twitter also experiments with groups: Communities arrive

Twitter also experiments with groups

They will gather people sharing the same interests. Test starts in the United States. Admins will have unlimited invitations and posts will also be visible to external users

Photo: Aytac Unal / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images After trying unsuccessfully to introduce Fleets - stories on the model of Instagram - now Twitter, in a moment of great news, try again with Communities, a function that is inspired by Facebook groups.

Communities has been launched for the moment only in English and by invitation but is viewable all over the world. Additionally, community moderators and admins have unlimited invitations and members have 5 invitations per community, which can be sent via direct message. In the coming months, the social network plans to add more ways to join in these new spaces.

But what does Communities offer? The idea of ​​Twitter is to foster conversations between users who share the same passions in small groups that are already present in different forms on other platforms such as Reddit or Discord, in addition to Facebook.

On Twitter, he explains the company, "there has always been a wide and disparate range of conversations", but there was still no feature "that could help people on the platform connect with other users who share the same interests or ideas".

Twitter explains that with Communities a user can post a tweet directly to the group instead of addressing the entire audience of his followers. At the same time, “only participants in the same Community will be able to respond and join the conversation, keeping it intimate and relevant.”

imagine an alternate timeline where everyone just gets you

say hi to Communities— the place to connect with people who Tweet like you. testing now on iOS and web, Android soon! pic.twitter.com/TJdKwUa4D2

- Twitter Communities (@JoinCommunities) September 8, 2021



Community pages and timelines will remain public, however. Everyone will be able to read, quote and even report tweets from the Community. Twitter writes that this was decided because it wants to continue to support public and quality conversations on its platform and, at the same time, "help people find a group of users with the same interests, providing them with a smaller space for discussion and conversations on specific topics ".

Moderators will play a central role in Twitter Communities: they can decide the rules, invite people and identify other moderators to manage exchanges within the group.

Twitter says that at the moment, the creation of these communities "is limited to the most popular themes such as dogs, weather, sneakers, skincare and astrology", but in the coming months it will give more and more people the opportunity to take advantage of the new feature. , creating groups in which to converse about any topic. Anyone wishing to create their own community can apply to the social network through this site. A few days after the introduction of Super Follow, the long-awaited subscription-based content system, Communities appears to be another step on the road to change for Twitter.


Social Network - 23 hours ago

Is TikTok winning the challenge with YouTube?


Bolsonaro signed a decree that will make it more difficult to remove content from social networks


We tried to understand what interests the citizens of Naples more on social media in view of the administrative offices

Topics

Social media Social Networks Twitter globalData.fldTopic = "Social media, Social Network, Twitter"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

---

Twitter has come up with its answer to subreddits and Facebook groups

On Wednesday, Twitter announced Communities, a new feature letting users congregate around specific interests on the site by joining semi-private groups.

The experiment marks a departure for Twitter, which has long sported an infinite scroll of various tweets simply based on who one follows. Now, Twitter will let users self-select into communities in an attempt to improve conversations. Its theory is that like-minded people will benefit from chattering amongst themselves, rather than constantly broadcasting to everyone on Twitter.  The strategy mirrors the shift on other platforms toward private and public groups.

Communities will have moderators who determine rules and social norms within the groups, tweeted Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour on Wednesday (Sept. 8). In a promotional video for Communities, one Twitter user writes a tweet and then sends it to “Black Women Photographers,” one of several groups in the menu options including Plant Lovers, Sneakerheads, and Crypto. A user needs to select “Everyone” to tweet to the masses.

That will allow users to direct specific messages to smaller groups of people with shared interests rather than tweeting to all of one’s followers. A tech journalist, for example, can finally tweet hot takes about the New York Yankees without risking losing followers (such as Met’s fans). One just has to find a Yankees fan community first. Beykpour said the tweets are still publicly viewable for anyone checking out the group, but they won’t aggregate on followers’ feeds or a user’s profile. The feature is being tested with iOS and desktop users and, if successful, will be rolled out on Android too.

Borrowing from Reddit and Facebook

Twitter hopes this could provide more permanent homes for Twitter’s niche communities. Twitter’s communities, often referred to informally by names such as like Black Twitter (the African-American experience on the app), Weird Twitter (a sort of anti-humor collective), Media Twitter (journalist types), are loose collections of people who follow and tend to share ideas about specific themes on the platform. The new groups Twitter is testing will give niche groups more control over who sees (and doesn’t see) their conversations, and give users an easier way to check in and see what these communities are saying.

This is a step closer to the model of some other social media sites. While Reddit has always been organized by interest-based subreddits and Facebook has long had Groups, Twitter has let its users develop niches somewhat organically. Certain tools like Twitter’s Lists and more recently Topics, follow-able subject matters like mixed martial arts or musical theater, have already brought the site closer to its peers. Communities is the clearest sign yet that Twitter sees the future as one that’s inclusive of many different ways of communicating.

Twitter’s new normal lets users choose

The fundamental dynamics of Twitter are changing whether the company fully implements Communities or not. In the past year, Twitter has taken steps to expand its options for users by introducing new experiences like the audio-only Twitter Spaces (a Clubhouse copycat) and different ways to control one’s audience.

Twitter recently introduced Super Follows, a way for influencers to paywall their own tweets. Instead of choosing to tweet or not tweet, stay public or go private, creators can now blast out their tweets to those who pay for their content. And new safety features also let users choose who can reply to certain tweets.

Twitter ultimately wants to improve conversations on its site, but it is doing so by further segmenting its users and their experiences. In providing more ways for users to interact, Twitter risks eroding one of the attractions of its original product: that one infinite scroll of tweets, some relevant and many probably meant for someone else.