One day I woke up and twitter sucked
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…
Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc... 
you should just watch some seinfeld. nobody ever liked cheers.
olayabarr
February 8, 2012
Totally feel this way too. One hack for me to get “news” value from twitter has been KnowAboutIt + News.me + Percolate. But true conversations & community are so far & few between.
Blogs oddly still carry this power, and I love rewarding my friends who take time to write quality posts (like this).
Curious if you see those great conversations from twitter 07-09 moving elsewhere?
Nate Westheimer
February 8, 2012
I really hope they move somewhere else…i just don’t know where. Facebook is to Path as Twitter is to _______?
jordancooper
February 8, 2012
and this my friend is why you should give tumblr another try
Michael S Galpert (@msg)
February 8, 2012
i will. going in my asana
jordancooper
February 8, 2012
I never went to sleep (aka Twitter always sucked). Just more now 🙂 I did just tweet for the first time in a month though so call me a hypocrite.
Andy Lawrence
February 9, 2012
Seems like this is a function of more users moving to Twitter. As more users move to this channel, more applications and marketing tools get developed to treat it like a microphone instead of a public hallway for conversation. Where are folks going to have their ‘real conversations’ now?
Simon Brief (@siguy)
February 9, 2012
i think that twitter is very much about who you follow. when i start to feel that the quality of my stream is dropping, i go through and remove people and hunt for 10-20 new folks to chat with. it’s important to remember that twitter is just a tool and it’s results are based on how we use it.
ps a great way to go through your feed is with friendorfollow.com
@MeghanButler
February 10, 2012