It is of general knowledge that Twitter is hard to understand. Why is it so hyped, when there’s so little to do? On Twitter, there is two things you can do to make it valuable for you: Be interested or be interesting. If you can’t be neither, there’s nothing left for you on Twitter. You can’t go on polishing your profile endlessly, nobody looks at it more than once anyway. You can’t spend your time taking tests of what type of a flower you are or which movie you should see next. You can’t spend your time posting links to your friends who will comment and “like” them out of responsibility toward you. On Twitter, you have to get to the point and get it there fast or you’ll sink into the oblivion in no time. Frankly, even if you do get to the point fast, you still sink into oblivion quite fast, and that is bad for your ego. That’s why you have to be interested in what others are saying too, in order to “get” twitter. And you have to know what interests you, and what type of people interest you, or you will randomly follow people who really are not interesting to you. Would I be so bold as to suggest that Twitter is a tool for smart people with a healthy ego..? (Not counting celebs and companies into that though.)
What people with a fragile ego will do to attempt to fool themselves into believing that they are interesting, is to follow a lot of people hoping to get a follow-back, especially those that use auto-follow tools if they spot one, and seek ways to “get thousands of followers automatically.” I doubt very much that those functions have much to do with practicality, but a lot to do with ego stroking. (I’m sure they explain it to themselves that they are doing it for business.) They are for people who don’t think their tweets will get them far enough fast enough for their own liking.
It is also quite an ego-bashing idea to believe that people would actually be interested in what you are doing right now. It won’t take you long to realize that NOBODY gives a damn about what you had for breakfast (unless you are a celebrity) and you will decide that you “don’t get” Twitter. Some people might have decided before trying it out that they don’t get Twitter, because who in their right mind would be interested in the daily activities of millions of nobodies around the world?
Twitter needs to be redefined so that people actually know what to expect of it. To me it’s a tool to broadcast 5 types of messages: Headlines, questions, one-liners, aphorisms and celebrity updates. Everything else is pretty pointless to put on Twitter. I admit I may have missed a type or two, if you can think of something else that is useful on Twitter, please do mention them in the comments!
