What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics

This is one of the reasons I still consider my blog to be my main presence on the internet. Twitter and Facebook and all the other commercialized social media platforms regularly change their algorithm in oder to suit their business model, without warning and without the consent of their user bases. Even though I am dependent upon WordPress (and my blog host, and several free plugins, and to Google for incoming traffic), WordPress does not control how my content appears to the outside world.

For those of us who use Twitter as a meeting-place for our professional community, as a stream of new ideas and revelations, or even as part of our classrooms, these pending changes to the platform could abruptly transform Twitter’s viability for our discourse. And if these changes go mostly unnoticed, we may not even know what’s gone missing from the feed. Moments like these are in part an opportunity to take stock of our reliance on corporate-determined algorithms for information and discourse, and to think about the ways our practices will necessarily evolve as a result of these types of changes. –Anastasia Salter, ProfHacker | The Chronicle of Higher Education.