Often, more often than not, a quote tweet gets more traction than the original. Other times, the original gets ratioed.
Our cognitive systems distrust primary sources to conserve our attention, and this is a way to compensate — if someone apart from the original monkey is screaming, there really are bananas atop that tree.
It’s a win for all parties if done organically. Both the monkeys who started the ruckus get fame out of their collaboration, and the rest of us get to see more ripe bananas in our timeline.
When done inorganically (marketing, the de facto study of human psychology, has a mastery of it; nor is it new, politicians have done it for millennia really), the second monkey gets paid off with the actual bananas, while the rest of us get our attention stolen.
I recently watched a beautiful slow motion video of a flock of long legged migratory birds, just chilling, when one of them starts to rise up, and in response the second one, and then there is a phase transition and the entire flock is airborne.
The analogous of that behaviour would be that clip of the person dancing on the grassy hill onlooking a concert. They keep dancing well past a minute, and nothing happens. But when the second person joins them after 90 seconds into the clip, suddenly and within the next 20 or so seconds, the entire hill is full of revellers dancing along with them. As if permission had been given.
The quote tweet phenomenon is not about herd behaviour however.
It is about a second person spending their social currency to endorse the primary (hoping to get a good return in terms of being recognized as the monkey that points to the monkey that points to the bananas), and the rest of us conserving our attention until we see at least one of them.