Twitter is now one of our primary venues for public discourse. But it is not a neutral or transparent medium. Twitter shapes how we interact, who we interact with, and — perhaps most importantly — it suggests specific goals for those interactions. Twitter doesn’t just pro- vide a speaking platform, nor are its effects confined to algorithmic filtering. Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game. Twitter scores our conversation. And it does so, not in terms of our own particular and rich purposes for com- munication, but in terms of its own pre-loaded, painfully thin metrics: Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. And if we take up Twitter’s invitation and internalize those evaluations, we will be thinning out and simplifying our own goals for communication.