Rant: Hey! Look at Me! Look! AT ME!

The self-centeredness of Twitter is part of what has turned me off from using it as much as I used to.

For instance, I have a service that tells me when people stop following me (Twitter doesn't think to tell you this like LiveJournal does, so several third parties took up that slack). Today I got an email that someone had stopped following me.

ONOZ! It is clearly the end of the world! I must...oh, wait.

Back on March 7, I got email from Twitter saying "TDMxxxxxx is now following you on Twitter!" (Not the real account name.)

Whenever I get one of these, I always visit their profile to see who it is, whether I'd be remotely interested in following them back, and how painful it would be to do so.

For the 'painful' part, I look at whether they ever tweet about anything remotely interesting to me or if it's just link after link after boring link (especially if they just post it without explanation) or all stuff geared toward marketing or becoming a social networking god. Those are the ones I hate the worst. "Follow me back so I have 13,000 followers and everyone is impressed by me!" It's fairly easy to tell these from the others.

If they pass all those hurdles, I then give them the final test: Follow Cost. It analyzes the person's tweet patterns and attempts to inform you how annoying they'll be to follow. It does this by giving you the average number of times they tweet per day overall, within the last 100 tweets, and the percentage of their tweets that are replies to other people or "golden" (exactly 140 characters).

TDMxxxxxx presents itself as "Retirement solutions for YOU" and is located near me. Oy vey. Who cares? Their "follow cost" was low, but do I really want to even see two or three messages each day about retirement solutions? No. So I didn't follow it back. I didn't block it, either, because it's not porn or some phishing scheme.

As an aside, a good percentage of the people I follow on Twitter do not, in fact, follow me back. They don't know who the hell I am, nor do they care. And I lose no sleep over the fact that they don't.

Almost four months go by. I get the email I mentioned above. Again, when someone unfollows, I tend to go to their page to see who they were and why they might have been following me in the first place. Not because I'm going to cry because someone stopped hanging on my every important syllable, mind you, but because maybe I want to unfollow them back if I was following them.

And I see this. Its most recent tweet:

Sorry unfriendly non-followers, I dumped you. I will follow almost everyone who follows me. #business #finance #markets preferred.¹

Oh! Oh! I am wounded. Wounded, I tell you. To the quick! :)

This, to me, epitomizes what is fundamentally wrong with much of Twitter. It's all about numbers. It's not about people making contact with people. It's about people shouting, "Hey! Hey! Hey! LOOK AT ME! I'm HERE!"

This person randomly followed me based entirely on the results of a search engine because I'm located nearby. They didn't look at my bio to see if I was interested. They didn't read any of my tweets. All they cared about was increasing the number listed after "followers" on their profile page. And then, when I didn't follow it back, it acted like a petulant four-year-old. "You're not friendly! I'm going to dump you. So there! NYAH!" And by "not friendly" it means "didn't validate my existence by providing me with the one thing I crave: larger numbers of followers." Pathetic.

The pièce de résistance, though, is "I will follow almost everyone who follows me." In other words, scolding those who had the audacity not to want to be marketed to on a daily basis about a product they most likely have no need for.

Boy, I'm really put in my place, I tellya! I'll just go over here in the corner and eat worms.

Sure, it may be Twitter "etiquette" (twetiquette?) to follow people back, but if you do that, you end up seeing a lot of crap you have no desire to see. (Well, to be fair, you do that anyway.) I get a lot of spam on my email accounts already. The last thing I need is to have it on Twitter as well.

Of course, let's hang a lantern on the fact that I'm ranting on one social network about the users of another one, and that as soon as this rant is posted, an automated service will tweet, "New LiveJournal post!" with a link to this very post. :) My followers on Twitter probably don't want to see most of what I spew (many of my followers on Twitter are also my friends on Facebook and LiveJournal). But they can do something about it: they can stop following me, if I get too annoying. :)

That said, I don't use Twitter much anymore, so ironically I have become one of those people who only posts links to his own blog, although I'm trying to ease myself back into Twitter a bit at a time. So, yes, I am Mr. Pot, and I am indeed calling Mr. Kettle black. So there! NYAH!

(If you want to follow me on Twitter—not because I crave attention or the increase in follower numbers—I'm @KaaSerpent.) </irony>

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1. Those #things at the end, for those who aren't Twitter users, are called "hash tags." They serve roughly the same purpose as "tags" do on LiveJournal. They're searchable, so if you want to see all the kajillions of posts, for instance, about the world cup, you can search for #worldcup and an auto-updating list of them will appear and you can read to your heart's content. It's a way to join in on larger conversation or make your own tweets show up on searches. This person is obviously hoping that someone searching for "#business," "#finance," and/or "#markets" will wind up seeing its all-important tweets and following it, so that it will auto-follow back, thereby perpetuating the unappealing, masturbatory aspect of Twitter that I so dislike.