Snap Is About to Embrace Algorithmic Curation
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) adopted an algorithmically curated timeline back in early 2016, which caused some initial backlash among some of its most engaged users, who started a #RIPTwitter hashtag on the service. The fear was that Twitter would start to resemble larger rival Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), which has long used an algorithm that decides what its users do or don't see in their News Feeds.
It's not clear why that would be a bad thing, though, since that strategy has clearly worked incredibly well for the dominant social network, which now has nearly 1.4 billion daily active users (DAUs). Beyond superficial comparisons as to who did what first, the underlying purpose is relevance. A tweet from 8 hours ago might be more relevant than one from 5 minutes ago, and with a strictly reverse-chronological timeline, you might miss the more relevant tweet.
Most importantly, it's been working for Twitter. The company has not only grown monthly active users (MAUs) to a record 330 million, but engagement has been soaring in the form of DAU growth ever since.
Source: Fool.com
