Who gives a tweet?: evaluating microblog content value

TLDR: A website that collected the first large corpus of follower ratings on Twitter updates finds that users value information sharing and random thoughts above me-oriented or presence updates, and offers insight into evolving social norms.

Abstract: While microblog readers have a wide variety of reactions to the content they see, studies have tended to focus on extremes such as retweeting and unfollowing. To understand the broad continuum of reactions in-between, which are typically not shared publicly, we designed a website that collected the first large corpus of follower ratings on Twitter updates. Using our dataset of over 43,000 voluntary ratings, we find that nearly 36% of the rated tweets are worth reading, 25% are not, and 39% are middling. These results suggest that users tolerate a large amount of less-desired content in their feeds. We find that users value information sharing and random thoughts above me-oriented or presence updates. We also offer insight into evolving social norms, such as lack of context and misuse of @mentions and hashtags. We discuss implications for emerging practice and tool design.