This Is Why I Suck At Twitter, A Rant
I avoided twitter for the longest time. Why? There’s a couple of reasons. First, Twitter for me has always had been pointless. When it first started it was just a place where everyone posted, “On my way to the store”, “Just sat down to watch a movie” and so on. It was just boring and useless. Also, because I like to rant about stuff. You simply can’t effectively rant on Twitter. 140 Characters at a time isn’t much a rant and people that know me know very well that I can turn a simple subject into a three page rant at the drop of a hat. I began to love Facebook because I rant. If something pissed me off I could tear into the subject. When someone posted something completely false, I could point out the actual truth.
However, I have learned that nobody really seams to give a shit about the truth. I have friends on Facebook that will continue to post the most outrageous lies because some right-wing nutbag page said it’s true. The same goes with the liberal pages, they can be just as guilty of spreading misleading information as well. Both of them posting their dire headlines aimed to spread fear. I found myself correcting the errors not because I am an asshole and want to prove I’m right but because I see no one else doing it. It didn’t matter if it was politics or a picture of a sic little boy that needs “Likes” to get treatment. Even missing children posts would drive me up the wall because almost every time it’s not a missing kid. Sometimes, it’s a kid that has died and these idiots are sharing the photo in an attempt to help with absolutely no clue as to the pain they are causing the friends and family.
Time after time, these same people keep posting this crap over and over again. I mean, you have got to know by now that Bill Gates isn’t going to give you money because you shared a post. Jesus isn’t going to save a dying child because their photo gets enough likes. It has just become too hard to keep up with people that have such a disregard for facts let alone common sense. So why do I follow them? Well, just because they can’t seem to determine fantasy from reality or fact from opinion, some of them I know in real life and they have other attributes I do respect. Thay are basically good people but should absolutely not be allowed to surf the internet unsupervised because they can’t seem to ever understand that just because they want something to be true doesn’t mean that is, in fact true.
So I decided to work with Twitter more but I am sucking at it so bad. I see people go from having only a few friends to thousands in a matter of a few days or weeks. I would love to have thousands of followers. But, I don’t want those thousands of followers to be all of the same thousands of people that I am following. To me that is pointless. I want a wide variety of info in my feed. And, if we’re all just sharing the same information than what is the point? I have already followed several people that don’t interest me, only because I felt it only fair to follow them for following me. I have since stopped doing that
If someone follows me, the first thing I do is go to their feed and scroll their tweets. Are they offensive in a way I don’t appreciate? (Sometimes being offensive is a good thing) Do they sound like an idiot? If so, I don’t follow them. On the other had let’s say they’re in a band that plays a type of music I don’t really care. I might still follow them if I feel that they might have something interesting to say. Maybe I might like the music and when I have time I will check it out. Same goes for authors or filmmakers. I do believe that everyone is capable of having something important or interesting to say. It’s why I scroll their feed before making a decision on whether or not to follow them.
So why do I suck at twitter? It’s been about a month and a half since I gradually started taking Twitter seriously. I’ve gone from about 100 followers to almost 500. And, I have some amazing followers I must say. But, as much as would love a huge following. It seems that some people only follow people so that they will get followed back or worse, in the hopes that the person following them will re-tweet the stuff they say. I Just want no part of that.
I want people to follow me because they think that I post interesting things. I try to post things that I like, things I found interesting, fascinating funny, news worthy. I don’t ever post things I don’t find interesting on some level. I don’t just post links with incredible headlines to get you to read my blog. Yes, I see the irony of this as if you’re reading this it’s because you probably followed a link to my blog. But, my point is that it’s not all that I post on Twitter. The vast majority of things I post are re-tweets or a link to something I found on the internet that I found worth taking a look at.
I have found this to be a terribly ineffective way to gain followers for some reason. Right now there are a couple of “people” that follow me and that I follow, who do nothing but post links to the types of blogs I mentioned above. They promote these blogs and almost every story I have gone to read makes no mention of where they got their information. One of them was so bad the other day I had to correct them in a re-tweet, just giving them the heads up that their information was completely incorrect. No response. So, once I again, I am finding that it just seems as if when it comes to social media, most people simply don’t give a shit about the truth. I want to follow people that I think do care about what they post. That care more about sharing something about themselves than promoting something to sell. As for me I am far more likely to buy something if I like the person selling it than just being told go go buy something.
I just want my posts to mean something. I am not saying that I want every post to be news worthy and science based. I just want to make posts that are at least interesting on some level, funny, scary, informative or silly. It might be a cool tutorial I just saw on YouTube on how to nail wood to cement or a movie trailer for something I want to see or have seen. It could be the latest episode of Simon’s Cat. I want my feed to be interesting and real. I think it is, I follow people from the horror genre to news outlets. Celebrities and science figures to porn stars and rock stars. So if I re-tweet something it’s coming from a place true sincerity. I don’t re-tweet things as part of some deal to get a person to follow me. I actually care about what I tweet. I figure if someone was nice enough to follow me, the least I could do is post things I enjoy rather than just posting or re-tweeting things that are nothing more than creative spam.
I think this is why I why I suck at it. It care about what stuff I pass along to people. I am not some stereo-typical Twitter person that only cares about how many followers they have. I don’t follow people hoping that they will follow me back. I follow people because I want to hear what they have to say not for what I think they can do for me. I follow some folks and all they seem to do is push their latest book or album and it bothers me a little and I will probably stop following them soon. Not because I didn’t like their book but because, I don’t need to spammed with every tweet about whatever they selling in every single tweet. I want to know what they think, what kind of sense of humor do they have? Why did they write that book? Why do they write romance instead of mysteries? I want a peek behind the curtain. These are things that interest me. I don’t mind the occasional spam but a little depth in some form would be great.
Am I wrong here? Am I expecting too much from people? I don’t know. What I do know for sure is that I suck at Twitter. I have made posts I thought were fascinating or things I thought were so damn funny and I get nothing. Not even a simply “Favorite”. So either my tweets are far less interesting and fun than I think or I’m just over thinking it all. Probably both. But, either way I guess it doesn’t really matter. I have to believe in what I re-tweet so I suppose that I will keep sucking at Twitter, I’m good at sucking at Twitter so why change now? Maybe there are others out there who will appreciate my suckage at Twitter and want to follow me for it. For that reason I am going to use this selfie with some pretty strong reasons to follow me on.
