I hate Twitter
This post really shouldn’t be here, but… gah…
I’m sick of Twitter. I’m fed up to the brink with it, raging with enough passion to fuel a thousand suns and incidentally provide a long-term solution to Earth’s energy concerns.
It is my berserk button. Worse even than reading about stupid Internet memes, or immature testosterone-overdosed conversations, or watching Doctor Who fansites sing odes to Steven Moffat and realizing I’m basically alone in my grudge against him for breaking a series I used to enjoy, or sitting late at night wondering why my love hasn’t woken up yet on the other side of the planet, or finding out that the shop is out of my favorite kind of chocolate.
No, this is all survivable. There is a special, raw, undistilled kind of hatred reserved for Twitter, enough to cause swollen veins every time I see references to it on every single website I visit, in every single IRC community I chat in. And I’m so sick of “not getting it” that my nasty side causes me to vent against people using it, bringing out my worst qualities that I usually keep locked up, or at least try to.
The worst thing about Twitter is not even that it’s a solution in search of a problem; that it’s basically asking you to justify using it; that for most of uses that its proponents defend, there are better, tried and true solutions that are open standards to boot rather than centrally controlled websites; or that most of it seems to be shallow, self-absorbed, pointless drivel or noise that’s incomprehensible unless you’re immersed in the Twitter subculture. (“RT @” anyone? What does that even mean?)
The worst thing is that it’s become self-perpetuating and self-sustaining, “famous for being famous”. From my experience, most people use it not because they have evaluated its sensible uses and decided it solves some of their genuine needs, but “because everyone else does”.
And with most other “trendy” things, I feel left out of the loop. But none of the others are regularly poked in my face with such prominence and persistence as this abomination of a website.
On the subject of trendy abominations that get regularly poked in your face: try spending the last 5 years without a Facebook account (because you don’t trust their privacy policy).
I’ve spent most of that time dealing with people who cannot understand why I won’t sign up for a Facebook account (due to privacy concerns), on the basis that Facebook would never do any of the things it reserves the right to do, and the last 6 months or so telling those selfsame people that I don’t care that they’re upset by Facebook’s behaviour, and I’m not going to get up in arms about it – I told them years ago that this was promised in the Facebook privacy policy, but had my concerns dismissed because “Facebook would never risk upsetting users like that”.
You are not alone! Fight the good fight!
“RT @foo” means “foo said _____ and I think it’s cool, so I’m gonna repeat it.” I prefer Identi.ca’s convention where instead of “RT” you put a little recycle symbol.
I never quite fit in with Twitter, either. Some of my friends really like it, but most of the time my account just sits there, collecting up dust.
I really like identi.ca, though. Not just from the perspective of “FOSS is Better”, but the fact that its’ really wrapped around a developer community. It’s a great place for meeting other developers, getting news quickly from devs and FOSS news sources, and having technical discussions with other users. Occasionally there’s discussions about films, religion, politics, and everything else, but I maintain that the calibre of intelligence in the identi.ca community is far greater than that of the Twitter one. Why this is, I’ll never be sure.
Ah, but see, unlike Twitter, Facebook at least has a point. It has, like, profiles. With, like, personal information.
You are not alone. Moffat broke it, though he had help. (How arrogant can you be and still win the auditions for lead character ?)
Also, “social networking” is the reinterpretation of the net by PHP “programmers” and overall has as much appeal as sausage with built-in cheese.
‘I really like identi.ca, though. Not just from the perspective of “FOSS is Better”, but the fact that its’ really wrapped around a developer community. It’s a great place for meeting other developers, getting news quickly from devs and FOSS news sources, and having technical discussions with other users.’
So basically, duplicating IRC?
Twitter isn’t IRC, not really. Well, there’s some similarity, but that’s just because people use it to chat.
What Twitter provides is a publication platform for your inner monologue – that little commentary track you constantly think about but never vocalize – and an aggregator for the inner monologue of other people who interest you. Suddenly think of something awesome or dreadful? Rather than just thinking to yourself “that’s awesome or dreadful”, you publish that inner thought – whereupon other people who find your thoughts interesting can see, and comment upon, the thought.
I can understand the skepticism. I spent a long time on IRC missing in-jokes between groups which had started on Twitter, and being annoyed about it. I only applied for Twitter and Facebook accounts when I bought a smartphone last year and there was an accusatory “enter social network details here” box during initial setup. Whilst I’ve largely ignored Facebook as over-complex and spammy, I’ve become addicted to the simple elegance of Twitter. I love seeing what interesting people are up to, and love having a platform to vocalize my internally-pondered magnificence, with a haiku-like limitation on message size forcing creativity and brevity.
Twitter/identi.ca are just other ways to communicate. I chose to follow people who are interesting/funny or just friends. They are by no means perfect, but then neither are IRC/mailing lists etc. All can be abused.
Several times I have thrown a question out on the microblogs and had a quick and useful response. Works better for me than having to either find the appropriate IRC channel or join yet another forum.
What I need are tools to help me find the interesting stuff. There are people I won’t follow because they tweet to much about topics I don’t care about as well as stuff I want.
Why would anyone in their right mind care about other people’s inner monologue? (Or, to use the proverbial kind Twitter criticism, the last time they used the toilet.) We keep that stuff in our heads for a reason.
I hope I guessed correctly which type of quoting your blog comment system uses…
<blockquote>Why would anyone in their right mind care about other people’s inner monologue? (Or, to use the proverbial kind Twitter criticism, the last time they used the toilet.) We keep that stuff in our heads for a reason.</blockquote>
Your inner monologue can contain better material than “I like to poop”.
Let’s say you have a bad customer service experience – you can vocalize your inner thought that “PizzaCorp is run by idiots, they messed up my order” – and receive a reply back from them directly.
You can have a thought like “Man, getting MD/LVM working is hard” and get a reply back with advice, or a link to a guide that worked for someone else.
Anything you’ve ever thought of blogging about, but weren’t sure you had enough material for it? Distill it into its purest form, and tweet about it – no more lost opportunities for discussion – small news items like “Just uploaded Foopackage 10.0” which people may appreciate, and then share with THEIR readers as an item of note.
And you can turn all your little sarcastic commentary on life into jokes people want to share, as it happens, and get a feeling of satisfaction that you’ve gotten things off your chest.
It’s really a major outlet for me. I continue to be baffled by the appeal of Facebook, but I can’t stop using Twitter, and would encourage people to use it.
Oh, and your copyright notice needs updating to 2010.
No, my comment system uses Textile, so a quote is “bq.” followed by the text of the quote.
Anyway, why not just post one-liners in a blog? I do that all the time.
“Anyway, why not just post one-liners in a blog?”
Of course you can do that. Just like you can have a blog based on manually edited static html instead of using a blogging system.
In general terms (“publicly posting stuff”), Twitter doesn’t offer anything new. What it does is taking a specific case of those general terms (“publicly posting quick, short, easily repliable stuff”) and making it efficient.
Does that automatically make it useful? Of course not. It depends on who you follow and who follows you, and one of Twitter’s virtues is offering tools and APIs for fine-tuning both things.
I don’t follow or let follow me anyone whose tweets I don’t consider interesting. As a result, my signal-to-noise ratio is very low.
I have IRC for that.
Which carries the following disadvantages:
* Narrow scope, i.e. only people in a specific IRC channel will see it, unless you cross-post to several, which is an annoyance * Ephemeral, i.e. unless the perfect person to see your message happened to be online and in the right channel when you typed (or has an IRC proxy), your message is gone * Disjointed, i.e. not only do you need to connect to all the right channels – you need to connect to all the right channels on all the right servers * Stateless, i.e. you can’t easily search for things relevant to you after they’ve been said, as you needed to know in advance where to be in order to log it
I use IRC daily, for focused stuff better suited to a “closed door” medium. Twitter is for general stuff I don’t see as needing to live in any one specific IRC channel.
To me, they are advantages.
Thing is, I really don’t see the point of relaying short messages non-stop to the general public, and having them stay forever.
Maybe I just don’t have the right mindset, I don’t know. Thing is, I know Twitter is not for me, but I don’t exactly poke other things in people’s faces if I know they’re not for them.