How Election Day Will Break Twitter
Twitter depends on users to curate their own feeds, and encourages a particular sort of curation: a follow list large and active enough to keep moving during slower periods, but small enough not to overwhelm during more active ones. Election day will not just be an outlier, it will be the outlier, an unprecedented flood inside the site’s rigid structure. (A structure which, it’s worth noting, will probably survive the technical strain of election day, after years of hardening against actual outages.)
Asked for comment, Twitter suggested inundated users view Twitter from one of its election-themed landing pages, or from relevant tag pages (#election, for example), which favor popular tweets over a raw reverse-chronological flow. Users could also create a special Twitter list, or manually check updates from a few key people. All of which is to say that Twitter will still be useful on election night — just, not as Twitter.
