These days, many Harriton Students use twitter. The fact that it is one of the few social media websites that isn’t blocked during the school hours is reason enough for a substantial number of students to sign up and make accounts.

But recently, Twitter has been suffering. Even within the Harriton community nowadays, popular tweets are few and far between. Behind the twitter rants by Kanye West and the fights between Perez Hilton and Kris Kardashian, new user registration has stalled on the website.

This past week, Twitter decided to announce a new solution to try to fix their problem- an algorithmic formula that will suggest tweets for people to view depending on what tweets they have favorited and what accounts they follow. Basically, Twitter is becoming more and more similar to Facebook.

In response to this announcement, the hashtag #RIPTwitter trended globally.

Twitter has remained mostly unchanged over the past 10 years. You follow accounts, view tweets on the dashboard, compose tweets of 140 characters or fewer, and retweet or favorite tweets that you agree with.

The most recent change Twitter has made since the implication of the algorithm was changing ‘favorites’ to ‘likes’ and changing the color of the heart for liked posts from being red when clicked to being purple. This new algorithm will leave these basic principles mainly unchanged, but it could affect the way Twitter is used.

Many users find joy in live-tweeting events like the Super Bowl or Olympics, and tweeting back and forth with people in real-time about whatever is happening to them. People even tell stories, using multiple tweets in chronological order, to convey a message to their followers about their daily lives.

If Twitter were to take away this ability by cluttering user’s dashboards with dated tweets and information that a computer picks for them, the number of tweets sent out during popular events could decrease significantly.

In addition, the need for an algorithm seems to be unnecessary, based on what Twitter is. All users pick who to follow, and Twitter even offers handy muting services to prevent certain people that you follow from coming up on your screen. If someone is uninteresting, you can mute them or simply not follow them.

Unlike Facebook, where everyone has a notorious friend or two with outrageous and offensive posts that always come up on our newsfeeds, Twitter finds helpful ways to prevent this. Twitter users have the ability to pick who to follow and who not to follow, so why should an algorithm be added into the equation to complicate the website further? Twitter is infamously more complicated than other social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. This new algorithm could take part of what makes twitter unique and bring it closer to being a Facebook replica.

Still, executives at Twitter are scrambling for solutions to fix the current state of the company. When Twitter released the 4th quarter earnings for 2015, it was revealed that Twitter lost two million users in the last three months of 2015, and shares dropped by about 12 percent.

While it is clear that Twitter needs to implement some new procedures to keep users happy, the fact that #RIPTwitter trended globally for several hours is clear proof that a complex new algorithm is likely not the correct solution.