Studies show 99%+ of TV, radio and newspaper consumers contribute less than 1% of the content.
What does that have to do with the impact such mediums have on the masses? Twitter is a read-heavy broadcasting platform. Just because the masses don't publish there, that doesn't mean they don't consume it and aren't impacted by it (embeds, story pick-ups, cultural influences, and on it goes). There's a reason nearly everyone that's anyone uses Twitter to broadcast to their public still to this day, despite Twitter being an aged platform at this point; that spans from famous musicians or athletes, to politicians.
The war in Ukraine? You can follow it on Twitter from official sources; in many cases better and faster than you can get it from any other mediums. Zelenskyy's Twitter account is one of the most important broadcast mediums that he has access to.
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
There's nothing interesting about that premise. If you removed the same feature from tumblr at the height of its popularity, it would have collapsed as well. If you remove integral features, it's usually bad for products.
Most people are mimics, not originators. There is no scenario where a platform is going to exist that is both massive in scale and is primarily original content produced by the masses. Most content on massive platforms will be cloned, copied, retweeted / reposted content. The sole exception is photo posting, in which the masses post photos from their lives (which are going to tend to be technically unique and generally require zero creativity to originate, point and shoot).
What does that have to do with the impact such mediums have on the masses? Twitter is a read-heavy broadcasting platform. Just because the masses don't publish there, that doesn't mean they don't consume it and aren't impacted by it (embeds, story pick-ups, cultural influences, and on it goes). There's a reason nearly everyone that's anyone uses Twitter to broadcast to their public still to this day, despite Twitter being an aged platform at this point; that spans from famous musicians or athletes, to politicians.
The war in Ukraine? You can follow it on Twitter from official sources; in many cases better and faster than you can get it from any other mediums. Zelenskyy's Twitter account is one of the most important broadcast mediums that he has access to.
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
There's nothing interesting about that premise. If you removed the same feature from tumblr at the height of its popularity, it would have collapsed as well. If you remove integral features, it's usually bad for products.
Most people are mimics, not originators. There is no scenario where a platform is going to exist that is both massive in scale and is primarily original content produced by the masses. Most content on massive platforms will be cloned, copied, retweeted / reposted content. The sole exception is photo posting, in which the masses post photos from their lives (which are going to tend to be technically unique and generally require zero creativity to originate, point and shoot).