I hate Twitter
This post really shouldn’t be here, but… gah…
I’m sick of Twitter. I’m fed up to the brink with it, raging with enough passion to fuel a thousand suns and incidentally provide a long-term solution to Earth’s energy concerns.
It is my berserk button. Worse even than reading about stupid Internet memes, or immature testosterone-overdosed conversations, or watching Doctor Who fansites sing odes to Steven Moffat and realizing I’m basically alone in my grudge against him for breaking a series I used to enjoy, or sitting late at night wondering why my love hasn’t woken up yet on the other side of the planet, or finding out that the shop is out of my favorite kind of chocolate.
No, this is all survivable. There is a special, raw, undistilled kind of hatred reserved for Twitter, enough to cause swollen veins every time I see references to it on every single website I visit, in every single IRC community I chat in. And I’m so sick of “not getting it” that my nasty side causes me to vent against people using it, bringing out my worst qualities that I usually keep locked up, or at least try to.
The worst thing about Twitter is not even that it’s a solution in search of a problem; that it’s basically asking you to justify using it; that for most of uses that its proponents defend, there are better, tried and true solutions that are open standards to boot rather than centrally controlled websites; or that most of it seems to be shallow, self-absorbed, pointless drivel or noise that’s incomprehensible unless you’re immersed in the Twitter subculture. (“RT @” anyone? What does that even mean?)
The worst thing is that it’s become self-perpetuating and self-sustaining, “famous for being famous”. From my experience, most people use it not because they have evaluated its sensible uses and decided it solves some of their genuine needs, but “because everyone else does”.
And with most other “trendy” things, I feel left out of the loop. But none of the others are regularly poked in my face with such prominence and persistence as this abomination of a website.
On the subject of trendy abominations that get regularly poked in your face: try spending the last 5 years without a Facebook account (because you don’t trust their privacy policy).
I’ve spent most of that time dealing with people who cannot understand why I won’t sign up for a Facebook account (due to privacy concerns), on the basis that Facebook would never do any of the things it reserves the right to do, and the last 6 months or so telling those selfsame people that I don’t care that they’re upset by Facebook’s behaviour, and I’m not going to get up in arms about it – I told them years ago that this was promised in the Facebook privacy policy, but had my concerns dismissed because “Facebook would never risk upsetting users like that”.