Archive for February, 2012

One day I woke up and twitter sucked

Posted on February 8, 2012. Filed under: startups, venture capital |

Something has happened to my twitterfeed.  I used to feel like twitter was a forum to share conversation.  To discuss content and ideas with my friends and colleagues.  I used to open the app when I wanted to engage.  People used to take risks, share controversial ideas…there was an element of inside baseball to the conversation and in some ways it felt like Cheers…you’d walk in, the same crowd would be around, talking, and there was a sense of community…what’s more…there was a social structure…people could show affection and appreciation for each others ideas….

Today, I feel like I show up to a sanitized, communityless feed of news and promotion.  I still visit, because my twitter graph is the best news filter I have, but my feed has lost it’s spirit.  I don’t feel like there is a conversation here any more.  There is no back and forth anymore.  All good communities have hosts…whether explicit or implicit, a community is shaped by influencers who participate actively and set the tone for interaction.  Why have the influencers abandoned this channel? Where is Fred? Sure, he’ll push a link to his blog, because twitter is an effective distribution channel for content creators, but his voice is gone here…Where is my “RT @username”?  What happened to the letters RT?  There used to be this subtle social currency, a recognition, an affirmation of voice…where you would look beyond the simple syndication button, go out of your way to copy/past a tweet, insert RT before, so that the speaker knew how you felt about what they said.  Now, that gesture has been replaced with a cold, sterile “Retweet” button…the gesture buried in an “activity update alongside every other piece of crap that happens in the site.  Even if I try to hold on to “RT,” twitter strips the link from my copied tweet.  What the fuck?  Why are you making this so hard for us?

My favorite personalities stopped speaking to each other and started speaking to a faceless mass…the concept of an audience replaced the faces in the community….twitter became a microphone instead of a public walkytalky…

Where has my community gone?  Where can I find original ideas and not an RSS feed of admittedly interesting news mixed in with self-promotional spam.  I miss the old twitter.  I miss the voices behind the content.  I miss Cheers…