Twitter redesigns its Apple iOS app to de-emphasize follower counts

“Twitter has made follower counts appear less prominent on its iOS app by making the font size smaller in a new redesign effort, according to a Twitter spokesperson,” Makena Kelly reports for The Verge. “The change comes after CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that he wants to rethink how the company could prioritize ‘meaningful’ conversations over numbers like retweets, likes, and follows.”
“Follower counts are just one piece of information that has been de-emphasized by way of this redesign,” Kelly reports. “A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that other details like locations, birthdays, join dates, mutual follows, and following counts have been made smaller as well. ”
Kelly reports, “Follower counts are one part of Twitter’s rethinking of some of the core aspects of its platform.”
Left: before. Right: after the new redesign. (image: The Verge)
 
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MacDailyNews Note: Via Slashdot:
In a fireside chat in New Delhi, India, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Monday… “One of the things we did was we had people follow each other — so you can be a follower of someone,” Dorsey said, explaining the thinking that went into carving some of the core features of Twitter. The company listed the number of people you had, and “made the font size a little bit bigger than everything else on the page. We did not really think much about it and moved on to the next problem to solve. What that has done is we put all the emphasis, not intending to, on that number of how many people follow me. So if that number is big and bold, what do people want to do with it? They want to make it go up.”
“So when you open Twitter and you see that number is five. It is actually incentivizing you to increase that number. That may have been right 12 years ago, but I don’t think it is right today. I don’t think that’s the number you should be focused on. I think what is more important is the number of meaningful conversations you’re having on the platform. How many times do you receive a reply?”