How Twitter Gamifies Communication

Digital discourse creates a game-like structure in our perception of reality. For everything that happens, every fact we gather, every interpretation of it we provide, we have an ongoing ledger of the “points” we could garner by posting about it online. Sometimes, something will happen in real life that provides such an outstanding move in the game... See more

But the thing is, more and more of life is structured like a game. Increasingly, corporations, institutions, governments have begun to understand how powerful this way of transforming and shaping our agency, our behavior is. And so social media is structured like a game. Our school and work lives are structured around points, ratings, grades, metri... See more

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such wo... See more

But on Twitter, if you tweet something out and one lone person out there— it moves them, it changes them, it changes their world— that’s not going to register. What that’s going to look like is your tweet got one lonely like and you’re going to feel like a failure. And one of the interesting things about this experience is the process of quantifica... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: Twitter is doing two things simultaneously. One thing it’s doing is it’s flattening all the kind of rich reactions you have into likes. So already you have not only a binary filter— like or dislike— that pushes you in the direction of aggregated numbers instead of a few deep connections, but you also get this timing filter where peop... See more