When Twitter Stops Adding Value
I recently have had what I like to call a “Twitter Meltdown”. Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. It’s just well I tweet a *LOT*. It seems as though over the last few weeks however, I had suddenly gone all addict OCD weird about it. I found myself angry, annoyed, spiteful, negative and well frankly not getting value anymore. Why? because my focus was all skewed. I just want to take a moment to share a tiny bit about what brought about my unhappiness so that perhaps you – my innocent victim reader might avoid these pitfalls. So here are the things that got me totally off-track:
- FOLLOWERS – It all began when I set up an account with Socialtoo . They allowed me to subscribe to a nightly email that gave me a summary of who all followed and un-followed me that day. I began to see people on the un-follow list with whom I thought I had a good rapport. Seeing they had un-followed me was like a slap in the face. Well ever the passionate and vengeful red-head, I had to un-follow them right back. Take that you back stabbing pseudo follower! There were others that had un-followed me and it was like being rejected by the class dork – it brought outrage! How dare YOU un-follow ME?! Why I should have un-followed your butt a long time ago – I don’t even like SEO! You get the picture. In literally no time flat, I became absolutely OBSESSED with followers, follower counts, follower demographics, etc. Obsessed. I worried about losing followers, when I’d never really cared before. I had always just been myself on Twitter without thinking. I’m not marketing a product. I just use Twitter for the wonderful interactions.. until I started freaking out about followers that is. I became jealous, spiteful, thin-skinned and uber-critical very quickly. So the takeaway here is that it wasn’t until I began to really FREAK out about followers that I stopped having fun. This whole follower-obsession will also bleed into the next few pitfalls.
- HOLY WARS – People on Twitter have opinions – lots of opinions. Sometimes they are not at all in line with MY opinions. That sounds logical and everything, but for some reason I seem to have forgotten that this is normal and perfectly okay. It only stands to reason that if I follow almost 2000 people I’m likely to get at least half as many opinions. Somehow this began to make me angry. I was angry at atheists. I was angry at the outspoken members of the ALT.NET community. I was angry at Democrats. I was angry at mothers leaving babies in daycare. I was angry at anybody who DARED to express an opinion contrary to my own. Many of such people got the axe. There! Take that! I un-followed you! Neener Neener! Ok, honestly, I really *am* a grown up. I don’t know what got into me. This whole outlook was stupid. I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In the meantime, I was really alienating several close friends and associates – some to the point of *gasp* UN-FOLLOWING me (yeah I know imagine that)! I had gotten entirely too carried away with my passionate arguments for all my opinions. I felt like I was always fighting or defending myself.
- SPAMMERS, BOTS and AUTO-DM’s OH MY! – Ok, I’m hoping this will be my very last rant ever about these things. I’m trying to really figure out why this topic drives me out of my mind, and I think it comes down to what I feel is the value and integrity of twitter. I’ll tackle spammers first. The presence of random names that just want to send you to a url, pimp their goods and services and not actually CONNECT with anybody makes the hair stand up on my neck. You know the ones – either no photo (of one stolen from somewhere else) and no meaningful bio - 1000+ that they are following with less than 100 that are following back (and those that do are only the poor saps who use bots to auto-follow everybody who follows them). They dilute the twitter experience as badly as stupid people dilute the gene pool. Unfortunately I found myself doing a lot of complaining about them. The same goes for the bots. I think the bots make me even more angry than the spammers. Bots are twitter accounts that are set up for the sole purpose of regurgitating things that other people are already saying on twitter. Therefore I might get a reply from somebody in my reply stream and then a few moments later i get the SAME reply but from one of these stupid bots. I hate them. block block block. They had me ranting a lot on twitter the past few weeks too as it seems we’ve hit some sort of critical mass where there are just tons of them. And last but not least – the auto-dm’s that a person can set up using socialtoo (or other services) that respond via dm to a new follower with a “thanks for following! go check out my free e-book” message. They are impersonal and cheesy. You don’t have to thank me for following – oh wait, maybe these people are way too hung up on FOLLOWERS like I’d become. It’s ok, really. I vette those I wish to follow. If I followed you, I already know I can learn from you, will enjoy the dialogue and you do not have to spam me with a bot message to thank me. Again, I have found myself bitching a lot about this lately. Those things have sucked a lot of joy out of Twitter for me, but never fear - this concludes my rant – the bitch stops here.
- INTOXICATION BY MY OWN VERBOSITY – This is perhaps the most humbling of my pitfalls of late. I had become so obsessed with sharing every minute thought on twitter than I’d become a bore. There a few days’ updates that when now read make me wince. Gee no wonder I’m getting un-followed (but I’m not worrying about that anymore *smile*)!! I realized I had become the *EXTREME* (insert Billy Mays’ voice) Twitterer. Ouch. I shall stop that honest!
So these are pretty much the ways I’ve sabotaged my Twitter experience. My remedy? I don’t check followers and dropped followers anymore. I refuse to engage in a discussion that makes me angry. I’m tempering my language to be more kind, useful, supportive and community-building. I’m even un-following some people not because I’m being mean this time, but because interaction with some people is like a trigger for me to become a big meanie. As for the spammers, bots and auto-dms – I’m trying not to gripe so much about them. Spammers I can report to @spam. Bots I can block, and well there is nothing I can do about people who still use the auto-dm’s. I suppose I could try to start a movement where we all un-follow those who use auto-dm’s, but ahh that’s a holy war isn’t it? So I’m back to getting VALUE from Twitter – and it’s all simply done by ADJUSTING MY ATTITUDE and not taking myself and Twitter quite so seriously. I'm back to just being myself.
Please leave any feedback or comments below! Oh yeah - Follow Me On Twitter Too! ;-)
Posted on 2.05.2009 at 5:07 AM