It having been about a year since I cut the Facebook cord and about 6 months since doing the same with LinkedIn, I eagerly anticipated the opportunity to sever my last connection with the VC chumpatron that is “social media” : micro-blogging site Twitter.
While the quality of conversationi and signal-to-noise ratio of this “RSS feed as a service” had been steadilyii degrading for some time, I held off from deleting my account until now because every once in a blue moon a rippable article came along that provided useful fodder for my vitriolic blog-cannon and a useful case study of some kind of stupidity or other.iii But this approach to panning comedy gold out of a sewer full of rabid alligators with stun guns mounted on their heads was both time-consuming and increasingly improbable as I recently ditched my iPhone for an old Nokia brick, thereby greatly reducing the amount of time I spent scrolling through tweets while waiting for a friend at a coffee shop or, y’know, sitting on the shitter.iv
Then last week, Twitter’s spam filter censorship gave me just what I needed : an excuse !
Sweet baby Hesus how narrow-minded are these kids ?! Seriously, Twitter is littered with so much spam by this point, whether robotic or fleisch und blut or both, that trying to “protect users” makes as much sense as sawing off the parts of your wife that you don’t like in the hopes of protecting your children from inheriting her flaws. The only way to protect your kids completely would be to… not have them.
So unless Twitter is going to voluntarily close up shop to protect the scores of sheltered innocents from bad words, then they can stay the fuck out of people’s way. Barring that, Elvis has now left the building, even though it might take a while for the slower kids to notice.
Lessons learned / re-learned :
1. It’s this easy to kill a business : piss off the cool kids and your days are numbered.
2. “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” And being the product sucks.
3. The value of a thing approaches zero as its popularity and accessibility increases.
4. Social media doesn’t matter.v
Don’t let these dishearten you. If you want to matter on the Internet in the world, start with an identity, do a bit of reading, and take a crack at writing on your own platform.vi
You’ll be surprised at the difference it can make, and who knows, maybe even the difference you can make.
___ ___ ___
- MP has long since
killedleft and watching Taleb beat bloody the faces of pro-LMO fragilistas is fun the first 20 times or so but starts to lose its novelty after a while.↩ - And more than just steadily, but in true
AmericanFrench style, inexorably as well. As the number of users and accounts increased – an explicit aim achieved by turning the once tidy (though always unprofitable) stream of text into a graphically oriented swamp so as to make it more readily digestible by the deep dark sea of illiterate “visual thinkers” – the swamp became all consuming.This is to say that Twitter turned a quasi-intellectual medium* into something so completely devoid of meaning that ‘fiat businesses’ had to use it because the user had “come to expect.” Literally, it’s a stupid tax, that is, a tax on stupidity.
*Hyper-intellectual by the standards of USia.↩
- Like retards thinking that Bitcoin revolves around their braindamage, or derps thinking that their failures aren’t their faults, just to take two examples.↩
- Now I just meditate on the stars or people-watch. Far more productive !↩
- Social media’s irrelevance is indeed quantifiable. Note that the “t.co” URLs are from Twitter and that they account for a measly 230 out of 52,452 “connect to site from” pageviews, representing 0.44% of traffic from external sources and 0.25% of total traffic for the last full month for which stats are, and will ever be, available :
- No blogspot. Just no.↩
