Twitter is the Anti-Internet

And that’s why I don’t use Twitter. Though there might be one or two other reasons why…

1) failwhale

2) Too much noise, and not enough quality noise. Just a line or two of contextless text, devoid of media, and mostly things that don’t interest anyone by the author. At least Facebook has a richer media experience, and a way to shush people that get on your nerves.

3) It’s creepy. My girlfriend once had a habit of Tweeting every place she went to (before Foursquare replaced this, which is an equally creepy service). What ended up happening is a stalker started following her around and “accidentally” showing up in the same place as her all the time. Not cool.

4) Hashtags are a bad way to tag your content. Why should tags take up part of your character limit? This forces Twitter users to make short, one-word hashtags that don’t make sense, or omit hashtags. What Twitter should do is have a separate bank for hashtags, where tags are automagically added, manual tags can be added, a more user-friendly way of inserting and editing tags (instead of just text), and there are fewer limits to the number of tags. There can still be a tag limit, but it should be per tag, not per character.

5) The way URLs are used is sick and horribly wrong. On the Internet, do you ever see a raw link with no context tossed into the end of your content? Of course not. We have this thing called a hyperlink, and Twitter should be using them, instead of encouraging raw links. And as with hashtags, links should not count as part of the limit, as they have nothing to do with content, and users shouldn’t be forced to bit.ly all their links.

6) URL shortening services don’t help anyone with their SEO, and they certainly don’t help Google. People and robots want to know where they’re going and where users came from. Forcing people to use these services hurts the Internet.

7) Very little profoundness and meaning can be construed in 140 characters. The Internet should be a place to freely exchange ideas without forced limitations. When you force tough technical limitations, you force people to truncate their communication. This just seems like it’s not in the spirit of… anything.

8) if u hav noticd the charactrlimit oftn forces slppy grammr. #AndThatReallyPissesMeOff

9) And continuing entries. #WhichDefeatsThePurposeOfTwitterButPeopleStillDoIt

10) http://bit.ly/16y0Ass #ThanksBitlyThatLinkSoundsPerverted

11) It has been hijacked by corporate marketing departments trying to fake the funk.

12) It is an evolutionary dead-end. What can they really do to Twitter to improve its problems, besides the solutions I’ve mentioned before? They tried Vine, but people aren’t really using it the same way as Twitter… it has become more of a comedy thing, because really, what else can you do in 6 seconds? You certainly can’t say anything important. Come to think of it, all Twitter is really successful at is being a low-brow comedy club. That and having petty fights.

13) The flow of information was not meant to be artificially “chunkated”. Have you ever seen the movie, “Fight Club” where the protagonist talks about how when you travel you live a single-serving life? Twitter wants you to have single-serving friends.

14) Due to having to remove words and otherwise change the meaning of your sentences to fit the limit, you end up saying things you wouldn’t normally have said. And because of that, people will misunderstand you. And because of that, you will offend, confuse, or bore.

15) It doesn’t do anything Facebook doesn’t already do, and Facebook does it better. Why use a whole other service for such a simple system?

16) Hashtag ambiguity. #nowthatchersdead (Now Thatcher is Dead? Now that Cher is Dead?). Granted domain names have the same problem, but this is the 21st century, we can do better.

17) Unnatural conversational threading. Most of the time, all you catch on someone’s Twitter is a partial conversation that, taken out of context, makes no sense at all. I’m tired of seeing tweets like “@somerandomguy I agree #yolo #swag”. And then I have to expand the conversation to see what the heck they’re talking about, which is usually equally uninteresting. No other website threads a conversation like this, because it makes no freaking sense.

18) Most people on Twitter are there because they need to be, not because they want to be. Celebrities, journalists, and businesses, and the people that follow these three. They’re on Twitter because it is what it is. And if celebrities and their followers use it, that’s a good enough reason for me not to.

19) Mourn-bots, and the shallowness of it all. Half the time everyone is in a mad rush to say things before everyone else does. We are all familiar with “RIP Stave Jobs” and “omg rip @stovejabs” repeated 100 million times whenever someone famous dies. I know I sound like a horrible person, but whatever. I don’t need the peanut gallery to tell me a celebrity died. I’ll find out.

20) Not really Twitter’s fault, but it gets overused in the media. Nothing irks me more than reading a serious story and then seeing what Flava Flav has to say about the Detroit Bankruptcy on his Twitter account.

21) According to journalists, it’s going to start some sort of social revolution in every country on Earth. That might be good or bad, but if it involves your average Twitter users, I’m guessing it’s going to be bad.

At any rate, it is pretty successful at inciting mobs.

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