Hi there!
I've always felt that Twitter was an incredible platform for the diffusion of ideas. But I've also noticed that often, certain ideas and content are spread based on someone having thousands of followers, or because a tweet has already gone viral.
I created Blind Twitter so I could judge tweets on the quality of their content, and not be influenced by who wrote the tweet, or how viral it has already become. By keeping tweet authors and Like/Retweet counts hidden, I got to decide free of outside signal the quality of a tweet. I found that by not being able to see who composed the tweet or how viral it was until after I engaged with it, I started to interact with my Twitter timeline much differently than I had in the past.
Hope you find this extension to be a fun new way to browser Twitter! If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to drop me a note on Twitter! (@avneeshk91)
@avneeshk91 Such a big fan of this idea. wish I could use it on mobile/in tweetdeck. So much of how people judge content is hidden behind bias and reputation, this is such a clever way of testing your implicit biases.
@avneeshk91 Very much like the spirit of the idea here. Democratization of content is a healthy thing. One question I'm curious if you thought about is the fact that the content we see is still biased in that it mostly comes from those we've chosen to follow. Is that an acceptable bias in your opinion? I wonder if it'd be interesting to experiment changing that as well somehow.
@ianmikutel good point, and definitely something I thought about. There is absolutely a pre-selection bias based on who you choose to follow, but I felt the issue of how users engage differently with the set of people they explicitly chose to follow was something worth tackling on its own. In theory, you follow a person with the intention of wanting to see their content and engaging with it, but it's well-proven (even in my own usage), that you're inclined to engage with certain people more than others.
I expect that many users already follow a mix of lesser-known and well-known people. I was specifically trying to tackle increasing engagement and diffusion of content from those lesser-known users. Just because you choose to follow them, doesn't mean you're necessarily doing your part to spread their ideas. Somewhat inversely, one decision I made was to hide who retweeted something that was introduced for your timeline. The reason for this is that often you'll see someone famous retweet something. But is it actually quality content? This way, you can decide without knowing a famous person has given it their stamp of approval.
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@avneeshk91 This is awesome! Reminds me of research Duncan Watts has done over a decade ago. Here is more about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/0...
Basically, you could do that, only with tweets!
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