But how can Twitter work if it doesn't show you (semi-randomly) people who you don't follow? How can discovery work (and especially the other side, being found)?
I still don't get Instagram. When I use it privately it just shows me accounts I followed manually, and obvious ads. I helped with a shared account some time ago and I never understood how people found our content without explicitly searching for us.
That’s what retweets are for. You see content suggested by people you’ve chosen to follow.
On Instagram people you follow reshare posts on their stories.
Why should people who don’t know you have your content shoved down their throat by generally piss poor “algorithms”? The alternative (recommendations from friends via retweets/reshares) is infinitely better.
But retweets is not content discovery, retweets are content posted by people you follow (albeit originally posted by somebody else).
I'm looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a new account with only few followers. How do you get people to see things you post, and ultimatively follow you? In principle you can just reply to their tweets and get their attention, or approach them outside of twitter.
In some fraction of cases, twitter suggests things you post to strangers that have common connections. I think that is beneficial and actually doesn't happen nearly enough, leading to people living in filter bubbles.
I've never used algorithmic timeline (using either Tweetdeck on desktop or Talon on Android)
I discover new people via retweets, reading replies, just running into then somewhere else where they link their Twitter handle. Really don't see a problem with that :)
I’m going to wade in with some pedantry here - retweets didn’t really exist for a fair bit of Twitter’s existence, and grew organically from users introducing the convention of prefixing reposts of other people’s content with an “RT @whoever”.
