It has now been a year since I quit Twitter and a year since I wrote my article telling folks to stop social media (which often is the one I reference most) so I figured that now can be as good of a time as any to write down something I have been which means to jot down since in all probability a week or two after that. Facebook is of course evil, but one might make an argument as to why a service like that ought to exist, I'm not going to make that argument but you will need to acknowledge that the argument could be made. The same could possibly be stated for Instagram, the argument for that could be harder to make but it surely may nonetheless be made. I even assume that an argument for the benefit of TickTok could possibly be made if it wasn't designed to be as addictive and exploitative as it's. But in contrast to these different types of social media there is no good argument for why Twitter ought to exist, it's just not a good idea.

Now I suppose that I should make clear that assertion a bit. Twitter is after all a multi-billion greenback company so if we decide its advantage based off of how much money it made it wasn't simply a good suggestion it was a fantastic thought, most likely better than any idea I'll ever have since its founders and early traders are actually obscenely rich from it. I'm additionally not speaking in regards to the implementation of Twitter, nobody does Twitter better than Twitter does, in fact I'd argue Twitter's cellular app has the most effective UI of any app I've ever used. After i say that Twitter is a foul concept I imply that the idea of sending out random tweets to the world about absolutely random things is a nasty thought. I suppose I could have made that sentence a bit much less clunky by merely saying that microblogging is a bad thought, however Twitter was not invented for microblogging, microblogging was a phrase invented to make Twitter sound like a good idea.

Also since I'm arguing that the sole idea behind Twitter wasn't a good suggestion my criticism is not unique to Twitter, XXX Videos it applies to every different service that tries to do the identical factor Twitter does. Parler was simply echo chamber Twitter with bad UI and no porn. Gettr (which apparently is the new new different platform) is simply Parler however secretly funded by China. Mastodon is just federated Twitter with bad UI and no regular folks. And Gab is basically just a fork of Mastodon (I'm sure there's someone out there who needed me to phrase that otherwise but I don't care). All of those totally different providers do things barely different but they're all nonetheless doing the identical factor so that you should not use any of them. A bad concept would not turn into a good suggestion when you alter administration.

Friend Dispatch System

To fully perceive why Twitter is a foul concept it will be significant to take a look at its origin story. When I was in highschool I watched a really good documentary about this however sadly I don't know what it was referred to as and have not been capable of finding it since, however I did discover this video that does a very good job with it. Before Twitter Jack Dorsey was involved and engaged on dispatch programs for emergency vehicles, actually that might have most likely been a fun problem back within the early 2000s because the infrastructure again then was way more limited than it's now, messages needed to be informative yet concise like, "Ambulance A534 has arrived at Destination X366" or one thing like that. Dorsey's idea again then was to create the same form of thing for friends, actually before the title Twitter had come to be they had been calling it a pal dispatch system.

The scope of what they thought Twitter could be was a place for folks to announce to the world that you just have been watching the waves on a beach someplace, though why anybody would care is beyond me, the whole concept of it was not thought by means of. I distinctly remember a narrative from the documentary I am unable to find the place the Twitter founders have been at a tech conference somewhere method again when Twitter solely had a number of thousand customers and lots of if not most of those users were additionally at there (not likely because of Twitter however because the early adopters of any expertise are the type of people who go to tech conferences). In some unspecified time in the future throughout the conference one of the Twitter developers, maybe Jack himself I do not remember, tweeted something alongside the lines of, "Lets meet at Jimbob's Ice Cream Shop at 8:00" (intending only for his close buddies to be there) then when 8:00 rolled around there was eight hundred individuals at Jimbob's Ice Cream Shop. This confirmed that a buddy dispatch system, at the least at that scale, wasn't a good idea.

Microblogging

Luckily (for Twitter's founders, not the rest of us) Twitter found its place in the world. I think Jeremy Clarkson describes it best as, "an opportunity for very left-wing people to precise more and more left-wing views to different left-wing folks." Now I'll admit that that statement only 85% true, but Twitter really isn't good for a lot else. Because much of Twitter's early functionality was tied to SMS, tweets may solely be 140 characters. 140 characters would be positive for a pal dispatch system but that's not what Twitter turned, Twitter turned a place for individuals to share opinions and ideas and except those are easy statements like, "All steak must be eaten rare," then 140 characters just isn't sufficient.

Eventually Twitter was in a position to cut its dependency on SMS and allow tweets to have an arbitrary maximum length of 280 characters but it surely remains to be unimaginable to completely present and contextualize any view with that kind of a restrict. Almost by design Twitter turned a place the place all people was speaking but no one may perceive what anybody else was really saying, however of course it wasn't by design as a result of Twitter wasn't meant to change into what it has became. The most typical difference between Twitter and its clones is that the clones almost always increase the character limit, regardless of this the good thing about the elevated character restrict is never seen because customers have grow to be accustomed to the quick bursts of garbage Twitter is well-known for so that is all that they post and when they do discover someone who really puts in the trouble to write one thing half the length of this paragraph they're too lazy to learn it. Twitter made us dumber by making us accustomed to reading much less. Twitter has primed us to make judgments based off of very little data moderately than to wait to learn the whole story.

There is also the problem that there aren't that many unique ways that you could string 280 characters together. Sure there are some individuals who can give you clever ways to put things however really everyone appears to tweet about the same issues and all of them accomplish that in similar predictable ways, it is boring, especially now when Twitter is governing speech.

Twitter is not social media

People consider the three big social media platforms to be Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, however why is it that Twitter is the just one with actual alternate options? People go to Facebook to connect with pals and household, that is what makes it social media and with a purpose to replace it someone would have to convey all of their associates and household over to the new platform which might show to be impossible. Instagram lately is really just Facebook for individuals who cannot learn and yet handle to function a smartphone, most people go there for the same purpose they go to Facebook and it can't be replaced for a similar reason both. People go to Twitter either to throw poo on the wall to see if it sticks or to look at the poo that managed to stay, 90% of Twitter customers never write a tweet, there is nothing social about that and due to that its functionality will be replaced by crappier options.

There isn't a purpose to make use of Twitter or any other service prefer it, there is sort of nothing attention-grabbing or uplifting posted on these websites, every good tweet shouldn't be worth the thousand rubbish ones you needed to tread via to find it. If for some cause you do feel inclined to throw poo at the wall on the web you must begin your personal site to do that on, however as soon as you have gone through the trouble of doing that, and particularly if you've attached your name to it (which is one thing everybody should do), you may understand that you do not wish to be placing crap up on there and as an alternative you will begin to create one thing great, something that can't be executed in 280 characters destined to solely be read by an military of sheep.