The New York Times’s recent decision to strip bylines from the stories linked on its home page prompted outcries from journalists outside the paper. They follow certain reporters from the Times, not necessarily the Times itself, went the argument; removing the reporters’ names from the front page made it more difficult to notice their work. The implication is that such readers are readers of Reporter X before they are readers of the paper itself.

Twitter users have no such benefit. The platform is wholly egalitarian: Eminent journalists share publishing space with politicians and political operatives, celebrities, anonymous trolls and bots, childish provocateurs, and the most typical group of them all, normal people. Almost any author on Twitter has the potential to be the day’s most-read user—a quirk of the system that extends to individual users who follow someone like Chris Hayes (1.7 million followers) but not the anonymous tweeter of a viral hoax.