Wednesday 24 July 2019

ditto

Via Slashdot, we learn that the software engineer behind Twitter’s re-tweet button has a lot of remorse about his endowment to civilisation, comparing the feature that was originally installed to facilitate news in a natural disaster, which was indeed a force-multiplier in terms of virality, to having “headed a loaded weapon to a four-year-old.” Other social media sites developed their own form of push-button sharing soon afterwards. There are doubts whether the genie can be put back in the bottle.