Twitter has now made it possible for all users to retweet their posts. All a user needs to do is go to one of their tweets, click on the little loopy “retweet” button, and then choose between quoting themselves or simply retweeting their tweet into their timeline.
Is it worth it to retweet your post?
“Now you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself with just a few taps. Pick an old favorite and give it a try!” the micro-blogging firm said.
But the question is whether a user should actually retweet his own post. It’s like a person telling himself that this was a good tweet but no one liked it, so give the world one more opportunity to be right about this tweet. Many users are skeptical and believe the feature will nurture narcissism and not be used for other things.
Twitter’s new feature has left people worried for several reasons, says The Washington Post. First, Twitter is a site where a core base of users has created an etiquette of their own for using the site, independent of the company itself. Whenever the company makes changes to the working of the timeline, it leads to complications or obliteration of those rules at times.
Soon we might also lose “.@” – an organically developed user solution. All tweets beginning with “@” are treated as a reply by Twitter, thus restricting who can view them. The micro-blogging platform announced that soon the “.@” will become redundant.
Will Twitter retweets gain popularity?
Second, there are numerous ways on the Internet that users can talk about and represent themselves, but they are rarely friendly to new ways to do it. People were generally incredulous at the time selfies were still emerging. People questioned why people would be interested in taking pictures of themselves and sharing them.
But now we have official selfie stick policies for many public spaces, the report says. The way the Internet looks will hardly change because of the self-retweet, just like what happened with selfies. However, it will become easier for people to re-insert themselves into a timeline.
There could be a few more changes from Twitter, but this change of retweeting one’s own post may not help make a dumb tweet sound better.
On Tuesday, Twitter shares closed up 5.57% at $15.36. Year to date, the stock is down almost 31%, while in the last year, it is down by over 57%.
