Things You Do On Twitter That I Hate

Oh yes, I really like twitter. I love looking at my stream updating with new tweets, I love clicking on links, I love tweeting about things most people don’t care about, I love sharing photos and news. Sometimes I catch myself oversharing or tweeting something extremely lame like “I’m having lunch at Joey’s Diner”, and then I hate myself for that, but overall I would call my relationship with twitter “a sizzling hot love affair with a time waster”.

Enough though with the love. There are things on twitter that annoy the crap out of me. Now, if you know me, you know that this is not very difficult to achieve; nonetheless, allow me to share the things I don’t like on twitter:

– Twitter is full of social media experts: sorry to break it you, but having a twitter account, a facebook account and 300 followers doesn’t really make you a social media expert. I mean that’s like 80% of twitterverse.

– Unbalanced numbers of following/followers: Sometimes I’m like “wow, cool, this person has a 1,000 followers”, and then I see they follow 4,000 people. Well, not so cool anymore.

– Indiscriminate use of hashtags: #some #tweets #read #like #this. I like hashtags and all, but I like keeping it in check too. Oh, and btw, I really like making up hashtags like #ihatemylife #omgyouareasdumbasyoulook etc etc

– Twitter stream that looks like your rss reader. Yeah, are you going to actually write anything about something?

– Unlimited use of haha’s and text emoticons: Once I stumbled upon somebody’s profile and every single tweet included one of the following: haha (in various multipliers of the “ha” syllable), heh heh, heee heee,  “:)”  “;)” or “:P” All I have to say is :-! zzz zzz

– A tweet every five minutes: Unless you are a news organization, you don’t really have to do that. Somebody once said “What do you call these people who apparently do nothing but tweet non-stop?” “Unemployed or underemployed.” Ouch.

– Plagiarizing: I know, it might sound shocking to talk about plagiarism on the interwebs, but there are people who instead of re-tweeting something interesting they read and add a comment, they just post a brand new tweet of theirs that virtually steals the original one. That’s very obvious when it’s very local news, and we all in the community know who broke the news.

– Tweets that consist only of one link: You’ve probably seen those, it’s only a link, without any other text to explain what the link is all about. The Boston Herald does this all the time. Sorry, but I’m not clicking on it.

– Oversharing / Too personal: some things should not be broadcast. Period. And, sometimes you should DM someone, instead of telling the twitterverse.

– Botched English language: Sometimes you see tweets that have very creative abbreviations so you have to read them twice to figure out what they mean. Srsly. Anyway, on twitter we botch the English language routinely, yet sometimes we have slightly higher expectations from certain users, like newspapers, authors, literary magazines, bookstores. I really can’t get over the fact how bad Harvard Bookstore’s tweets are; looks like they don’t really like using capital letters, and sometimes they don’t make any sense at all. ‘Cause, you know, nothing says esteemed bookstore better than this one “we have a gorgeous, luscious, like 3 foot book of the best of flare magazine, used & new. amazing design, fold out pages, postcards, style!” Say wha????

– The Fail Whale: ‘Nuff said.

Also, for the time being I’m being skeptical about foursquare, but who knows, I might embrace it in the future. As I recall, a year ago I was a twitter skeptic too…