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Others' Criticisms of Twitter

• 2014.10.29 - antirez.com - This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter
  
  • Summary:
    • Many people on Twitter will read your tweet and form an opinion about it...
      • without first taking the time to fully understand the context in which you sent it.
      • without first taking the time to double-check that they are not "putting words in your mouth" / misreading what you said.
      • based on another user's interpretation of what you meant.
    • The large number of people on Twitter makes this problem more serious that it would be if the community was smaller (like, say, a forum).
    • "what you get is the wrong message retweeted one million times"
  • In the comments:
    • Twitter is a useless medium for having any sort of nuanced, conversational interaction. You're guaranteed to eventually fall into a misunderstanding with someone that can't be addressed without posting 10 tweets in a row and looking crazy. It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction (i.e. not discussions, refutations, arguments, corrections, etc.)
      
      I took a month off of Twitter after a very prominent Twitter user retweeted a sarcastic observation I made to his half a million followers without any context.. for which I got a whole ton of shit from busybodies. After I returned, I basically vowed to keep things clean and unambiguous, to focus on using Twitter to achieve my aims, and to just block anyone I'm not interested in seeing immediately. It has worked quite well so far.
    • I share the frustration. If I spend 15 minutes thinking and writing something, I want people to spend more than 15 seconds trying to understand what I'm saying.
    • Twitter is a very interesting medium because it makes it extremely easy to communicate with interesting people, but with the 140c limit it often results in misunderstandings. That makes it a terrible platform for heated debates about somewhat controversual topics
      
• 2015.02.16 - The Atlantic - The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting
• 2015.05.06 - BuzzFeed - Joss Whedon Calls “Horsesh*t” On Reports He Left Twitter Because Of Militant Feminists
  
  • "I just thought, Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place," he said. "And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella.
  • "I've said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically. Because suddenly that's the litmus test for everything you do..."
  • "There's no way to find any coherence when everything has to be parsed and decried."
  • the steady stream of just like, 'You suck, you suck, you suck' [on Twitter] — I don't really think I need to visit You Suck Land anymore."
  • "I so appreciate when people took the time to say something nice. But for my own self, it's like, at some point, you're just like a little compliment leech. That's not going to help your writing any more than people slamming on you."
  • I just had a little moment of clarity where I'm like, You know what? If I want to get stuff done, I need to not constantly hit this thing for a news item or a joke or some praise
  • "I think the articles that I found, I can find elsewhere," Whedon said. "I'll miss some jokes..."
• 2015.05.08 - Salon - Joss Whedon is right: Twitter is a loud, shallow waste of time — and I’m leaving, too
  
  • the dirty secret of Twitter is “Nobody clicks”; his own typical “engagement rate” on a link he posts is 0.07 percent, and ever since Twitter gave us the button to look at the “analytics” for individual tweets I’ve come to the conclusion that Dash’s engagement rate is actually unusually high–or at least higher than mine.
  • “Twitter is like doing cut-rate cocaine at a boring party where a lot of the guests dislike you.”
  • the ancient social ritual of gathering a bunch of unrelated strangers in a space and letting them bounce witty anecdotes and observations off each other to see what develops.
  • Praise: I’ve made friends on Twitter that I’d count as good friends; I’ve spoken to people who met their spouses on Twitter.
  • Praise: The feeling of just not being alone, of being able to see other people reacting to things at the same time you are–that’s the most seductive and most addictive thing about social media.
  • Parties are a great way to network, to make new friends, to have fun. They’re also a great way to throw time down the drain hoping to do all of the above things but failing to do so
  • Joss Whedon points out that it’s the compliments, the retweets, the favs that kept him constantly reloading his Twitter app. (...) You become like the attractive person who goes out just to get validation that you are in fact attractive.
  • Yes, Joss got harassment on Twitter. (...) yes, the constant static of haters probably played a role.
  • I have had to deal with angry trolls crossing over to abusive phone calls, attempts to hack my accounts, being doxed, etc.
  • you do have to deal with a relentless steady stream of people deliberately trying to fuck with you and ruin your day–and even after you get high-profile enough that it stops being worth your time to engage, the constant low-level irritation of hitting Twitter’s notoriously unreliable “Block” button gets to you.
  • very little seems to come out of my tweets–the exception is when the mob is riled up, at which point I can expect every tweet I’ve ever made to get dogpiled and dissected
  • too much easy stimulation, too much rapid-fire shallow interaction, too much noise.
• 2016.02.18 - The Guardian - Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?
  • “It’s overwhelming,” says Feely, a Facebook and Instagram regular. “It’s just an enormous time-suck for the amount of information you get from it.”
  • there’s the Chicago grad student who said using Twitter makes him “feel regret”.
  • ...British theater director who compared posting on the service to “throwing a pebble into a really unfriendly canyon”.
  • There's more I need to summarize.
• 2016.09.30 - Vanity Fair - Marc Andreessen Quit Twitter and Now He Feels “Free as a Bird”

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