Twitterpating Season
Twitter sucks.
Sorry. I've been using it for longer than I think most of you have -- over a year, in fact, which is eons in Internet Time -- so I consider myself an authority. And it sucks now. Maybe it always sucked, but it definitely sucks now.
Unfortunately, Twitter's suck isn't really inherent to Twitter; I'm sure Facebook sucks for the same reasons, but I had sufficient disinterest to avoid that. The next bandwagon everyone jumps to will also suck, because the public makes everything suck. I thought I was too young to care about the Eternal September; apparently not.
Let us examine the type of content that now makes up Twitter.
Spam.
Easy target, I know.
Anything that gets popular gets spammed, and we don't have any good way to prevent this yet. Twitter does a decent job of blocking spammers quickly, but only after they've already tricked dozens of people into actively looking at the follower's tweets. Worse, because URL shortening is enforced (rather than, I don't know, some age-old technology like a label), I have no idea what the links in someone's tweets are and it becomes all the harder to tell at a glance what's spam and what's someone trying to run a classic link-and-comment blog in 140 characters.
Then there's "legitimate" spam, where real people hock their real site and mass-follow people to get more eyes on their crap. Except I don't think you can get banned for this one.
And then there's metaspam, where people mass-follow in an attempt to sell their Twitter mass-follower thing. I got followed by a guy who was actually trying to popularize his pyramid scheme Twitter following app. Basically you give him your username and password, and his app will follow the last five people who used it (plus him) on your account. Then you're part of the list, so the next five people to use it will follow you, and you get some stranger who probably doesn't care about anything you say automatically reading it anyway. Awesome! I'm so glad communication has been reduced to quantity over quality.
People who don't know how to use RSS.
This is getting really dumb, and I am ashamed that I am participating.
There are a whole bunch of Twitter accounts that serve no purpose except to stream an RSS feed. There's even a site devoted to setting one of these up with minimal effort. (Which I used. Yes, yes, shame etc.) Well, okay, that's fine, I guess. A newsreader takes at least 20 seconds to set up, and is only about six hundred times more functional, so why not stick feeds in Twitter?
But a lot of people with both a Twitter and a blog will post the contents of each to the other.
So if I follow both of these accounts-as I imagine most people will do-I'm reading everything twice. Twitter is cluttered with tiny announcements of new posts I will already read later. My friends page is cluttered with lists of offhand thoughts I've already seen multiple times that usually don't tell me anything interesting or useful.
Why are we doing this? RSS is an incredible tool, and yet we are preferring the copy-paste approach. Here, try it out: go log into Google Reader, add a few feeds from sites you normally check religiously, and enjoy. Firefox even supports adding feeds to Google Reader for you; just click the button in the address bar.
If you're following someone on Twitter but don't use LJ, follow his/her LJ feed. If you have someone friended on LJ but don't use Twitter, hey! There's a feed for that too. There's no good reason to be duplicating all this content (and non-content), especially when it doesn't at all fit the medium it's being copied to. LJ is for writing, Twitter is for.. saying, I guess.
Other people's private-or privater-conversations.
At any given time, two-thirds of my Twitter stream is other people holding a conversation with other other people I don't know. And yet the model encourages this, and with the limits of Twitter profile fields it's difficult to shift a conversation to another medium like IM if I don't already have alternative contact information for someone.
Exacerbating this problem, half the conversations I try to follow are private. So not only do I have halves of conversations mixed in with public messages, but I can't see the other half of many of the conversations even if they do sound interesting.
Things that could have been interesting blog posts.
On multiple occasions, I've caught myself reducing an interesting problem and its eventual solution into two tweets: a complaint and a retraction. I could have written an interesting explanation of what caused the problem and how I solved it and why it worked, thus passing on my experience to anyone else who has a similar problem in the future or is just plain interested. And I have been deliberately trying to only tweet interesting things; even with that, I am still encouraged to dumb down everything I think to fit in a tiny box. I'd hope my thoughts are worth slightly more than that.
Things that couldn't have been interesting blog posts.
I don't care what you had for lunch. Really. Summarize your day in some sort of live journal if you want, and I might take it all in as a continuous narrative, but I don't need real-time updating on the minutia. (This is why I haven't been following most people who follow me, if you are curious.)
So, due to the above, I'm dropping Twitter as yet another thing to check religiously when I'm bored. There is too much more noise than signal. It's great if I'm at an event and need to track where people are right now, but beyond that it is fairly worthless and contains very little that I find I'm glad I read.
I'm going to try to really write more instead and attract real readers to this blog/journal/thing, rather than just discarding potentially interesting thoughts-or flinging them into the ocean of irrelevance that is the latest social networking fad.
Also, em dashes are awesome.
addendum:
I would like to add that the sudden increase in ajaxyness in the Twitter Web app has certainly not helped. It's gone from simple and responsive to nearly unusable. The page takes forever to load, I lose focus the moment it finishes which is annoying if I've already started typing, and the Back button never works any more because heaven fuckin' forbid we actually do page loads any more. Even NoScript cannot seem to save me. Hrrgh ajax.
Sorry. I've been using it for longer than I think most of you have -- over a year, in fact, which is eons in Internet Time -- so I consider myself an authority. And it sucks now. Maybe it always sucked, but it definitely sucks now.
Unfortunately, Twitter's suck isn't really inherent to Twitter; I'm sure Facebook sucks for the same reasons, but I had sufficient disinterest to avoid that. The next bandwagon everyone jumps to will also suck, because the public makes everything suck. I thought I was too young to care about the Eternal September; apparently not.
Let us examine the type of content that now makes up Twitter.
Spam.
Easy target, I know.
Anything that gets popular gets spammed, and we don't have any good way to prevent this yet. Twitter does a decent job of blocking spammers quickly, but only after they've already tricked dozens of people into actively looking at the follower's tweets. Worse, because URL shortening is enforced (rather than, I don't know, some age-old technology like a label), I have no idea what the links in someone's tweets are and it becomes all the harder to tell at a glance what's spam and what's someone trying to run a classic link-and-comment blog in 140 characters.
Then there's "legitimate" spam, where real people hock their real site and mass-follow people to get more eyes on their crap. Except I don't think you can get banned for this one.
And then there's metaspam, where people mass-follow in an attempt to sell their Twitter mass-follower thing. I got followed by a guy who was actually trying to popularize his pyramid scheme Twitter following app. Basically you give him your username and password, and his app will follow the last five people who used it (plus him) on your account. Then you're part of the list, so the next five people to use it will follow you, and you get some stranger who probably doesn't care about anything you say automatically reading it anyway. Awesome! I'm so glad communication has been reduced to quantity over quality.
People who don't know how to use RSS.
This is getting really dumb, and I am ashamed that I am participating.
There are a whole bunch of Twitter accounts that serve no purpose except to stream an RSS feed. There's even a site devoted to setting one of these up with minimal effort. (Which I used. Yes, yes, shame etc.) Well, okay, that's fine, I guess. A newsreader takes at least 20 seconds to set up, and is only about six hundred times more functional, so why not stick feeds in Twitter?
But a lot of people with both a Twitter and a blog will post the contents of each to the other.
So if I follow both of these accounts-as I imagine most people will do-I'm reading everything twice. Twitter is cluttered with tiny announcements of new posts I will already read later. My friends page is cluttered with lists of offhand thoughts I've already seen multiple times that usually don't tell me anything interesting or useful.
Why are we doing this? RSS is an incredible tool, and yet we are preferring the copy-paste approach. Here, try it out: go log into Google Reader, add a few feeds from sites you normally check religiously, and enjoy. Firefox even supports adding feeds to Google Reader for you; just click the button in the address bar.
If you're following someone on Twitter but don't use LJ, follow his/her LJ feed. If you have someone friended on LJ but don't use Twitter, hey! There's a feed for that too. There's no good reason to be duplicating all this content (and non-content), especially when it doesn't at all fit the medium it's being copied to. LJ is for writing, Twitter is for.. saying, I guess.
Other people's private-or privater-conversations.
At any given time, two-thirds of my Twitter stream is other people holding a conversation with other other people I don't know. And yet the model encourages this, and with the limits of Twitter profile fields it's difficult to shift a conversation to another medium like IM if I don't already have alternative contact information for someone.
Exacerbating this problem, half the conversations I try to follow are private. So not only do I have halves of conversations mixed in with public messages, but I can't see the other half of many of the conversations even if they do sound interesting.
Things that could have been interesting blog posts.
On multiple occasions, I've caught myself reducing an interesting problem and its eventual solution into two tweets: a complaint and a retraction. I could have written an interesting explanation of what caused the problem and how I solved it and why it worked, thus passing on my experience to anyone else who has a similar problem in the future or is just plain interested. And I have been deliberately trying to only tweet interesting things; even with that, I am still encouraged to dumb down everything I think to fit in a tiny box. I'd hope my thoughts are worth slightly more than that.
Things that couldn't have been interesting blog posts.
I don't care what you had for lunch. Really. Summarize your day in some sort of live journal if you want, and I might take it all in as a continuous narrative, but I don't need real-time updating on the minutia. (This is why I haven't been following most people who follow me, if you are curious.)
So, due to the above, I'm dropping Twitter as yet another thing to check religiously when I'm bored. There is too much more noise than signal. It's great if I'm at an event and need to track where people are right now, but beyond that it is fairly worthless and contains very little that I find I'm glad I read.
I'm going to try to really write more instead and attract real readers to this blog/journal/thing, rather than just discarding potentially interesting thoughts-or flinging them into the ocean of irrelevance that is the latest social networking fad.
Also, em dashes are awesome.
addendum:
I would like to add that the sudden increase in ajaxyness in the Twitter Web app has certainly not helped. It's gone from simple and responsive to nearly unusable. The page takes forever to load, I lose focus the moment it finishes which is annoying if I've already started typing, and the Back button never works any more because heaven fuckin' forbid we actually do page loads any more. Even NoScript cannot seem to save me. Hrrgh ajax.