Twitter is fucking retarded
So I played with it for a while. Cracked jokes. Followed famous people. Followed not-so-famous people. Geolocated myself. Posted pictures via twitpic or douchetweet or fuckchirp or whatever lamprey-like fly-by-night jackass service reared up to add the moronic and superfluous features that the folks at Twitter were smart enough to originally eschew.
And my verdict is: It’s retarded. It’s AOL keywords.
It’s the CB radio of the 2000’s.
For all the connectivity Twitter supposedly offers, it offers no genuine connections at all. Everything is passive. You send out a “tweet”1 into the universe with no idea or clue that anyone will answer. You have no idea if anyone heard you. You have no indication that anyone cares. It’s just a firehose of the pointless flotsam and jetsam of cultural minutia and lifestyle effluvium, delivered in a lightly distracting, OM NOM NOM-style all-you-can-eat infotainment/ego-casting stream to whatever millennial-enabled wireless device you’re willing to hook into it2.
It’s like talking to yourself, out loud, on the bus. And it offers just about the same amount of useful feedback.
If Twitter is the future of online communication, or the future of blogging and/or journalism: I’m out. I want the communication I spend my ever-decreasing amount of free time on to be richer, clearer; not constrained by arbitrary limitations based on the maximum length of SMS text messages.
1 I never thought I’d hate a single word more than the word ‘blog,’ but here we are.
2 Also see: Facebook.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
But on the plus side, it’s like talking to yourself, out loud, on the bus.
‘Cos frankly, the downfall of the blog is the FEEDBACK.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so true.
The Rise and Fall of Comment Culture is its own cranky essay, but I think we’re going to see fewer and fewer sites turning on comments as time marches on; or if they do accept comments, switching to a fully moderated model where every comment is checked by a Real Live Person.
There’s really something to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
November 24th, 2008 at 9:20 am
FYI, twitterfree.com is available for the taking.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am
Hahaha. I love this post. Glad to see you haven’t left the Twitterverse yet!
December 4th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
LMFAO!!! this is EXACTLY how i feel about twitter. great post.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:08 am
This reflects what I’ve said for a long time:
The only folks who use twitter are utter Twits.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:13 am
But why, WHY, pray tell, does the Fail Whale look so happy?
December 6th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
In your point about talking to yourself out loud on a bus: how is blogging any different? You don’t know that anyone will comment for sure, you don’t know if anyone is even going to read it. In order to be effective with any online medium you have to be immersed in the culture to some extent. If you have friends who are cool on twitter then you’ll have a good experience. The problem is when people forget that just posting “I’m taking a shower” isn’t interesting to read. You have to have a descent amount of wit to make your day interesting by tweeting those small details in a way that makes people want to read them. It’s just like blogging, only more personal. Sorry man - I don’t think you have any valid points here once you get past the shock value and witty sarcasm- but it was still interesting to read because of those two elements….do I have a point?
December 7th, 2008 at 8:36 am
I have enough room here on the blog to make a cogent argument. On Twitter, I’m forced to write like Winston Churchill and make everything I post like some sort of micro-witty bon mot. Plus, we can see all the discussion on my post on one page without flipping through other people’s (ugly ass) Twitter pages.
My point is that it’s not viable for what it’s being used for. It’s viable for “I AM WASHING THE DISHES” or “THIS SOUP IS GREAT” but for back and forth discussion or exploration of a larger point, it falls down fast and hard.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I decided to give Twitter a try for a little while, but it remains to be seen how it goes. I agree that the disconnected nature of responses is kind of off-putting (Facebook seems a lot better in that respect). I’m hoping that some of the twitter clients out there help on that aspect of things.
I tended to be overly verbose back when I had a blog (and even now I spend too much time polishing e-mail messages), so maybe this will help me get more to the point. ;)
December 15th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
December 18th, 2008 at 11:49 pm