Here's a quote tweet for you. Friends, you might see a lot of artists complaining about this today, but might not know why. I'm going to explain why this is such a bad thing, and why - if there's any way around this - you shouldn't QRT art no matter if twitter "prompts" you. https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1314603536471080960

You know how it is. When you make a QRT, it becomes its own post. The original poster gets notified of the quote itself happening but they aren't going to be notified of any comments or likes that the new quote gets. They'd have to go out of their way to repeatedly check.

In other words, an artist begins to lose engagement, both in the algorithmic social media sense and the very human sense, with how people are responding to their work. The quoter's name and pfp are now front and center. THEIR post is technically the one getting the attention.

This isn't as big a deal if it's just normal twitter chatter, memes, whatever. But artists need all the help they can get to grow, especially if they support themselves via their art. (Hi!) Don't take it away from them to bring attention to yourself.

To be honest, it's just considered pretty rude! But not everyone may know that. If you QRT some art and say "Nice, I love this!" or whatever, you may think you're helping, but it's really not. Just retweet your favorite artists! Let the words THEY posted speak for the art.

If you want to add a further personal comment that you may be too shy to share with the artist, use "LRT" (last retweet) in a new tweet of your own after you've retweeted! Something like "LRT: THIS SHIP MELTS MY HEART".

And if you're not too shy, hey, the algorithm still likes posts with lots of comments as far as we can tell. And artists love them too! So if you have something nice to say, reply :)

I'm getting replies saying this is only going to apply to disputed political content as the thread says, and maybe so, but 1) I don't trust twit to roll out a system like this smoothly with no bugs and accurate detection, & 2) this is just general info that applies at all times!