Seven Ways to Make Twitter Suck

There's this thing that has been happening lately which has crawled under my skin, festered, and now has me contemplating acting like a complete jerk--I've been getting grief for unfollowing people on twitter. Here's the thing, if you tweet something like "I knew @burghbaby was too much of a *redacted* to follow anyone who isn't super popular," you're kind of validating my decision to hit that button. (Yes. That happened. Really.) Bear with me while I rant a bit . . .

My approach to twitter is very simple--I follow people who talk to me and who use twitter in a way that is compatible with how I use it. That's to say, I don't think there is a right or wrong way to use twitter, but I do think there are ways that don't work for me, so I do what I can to keep incompatible things out of my twitter universe. If I unfollow someone, it's just that we don't use twitter in the same way. I may very well really like that person when face-to-face, I just see twitter differently than they do. Examples:

1. The Never-Ending Whine Fest. You are absolutely entitled to use twitter as a way to vent about all of the things that annoy you all day long. However, if your daily routine is to post that your car is gross, your mom won't leave you alone, your boss is a jerk, your hair is ugly, and the weather is too hot/cold/wet/dry/windy/cloudy/snowy/rainy/whatever, and you don't make me laugh even once while throwing your daily Whine Fest, UNFOLLOW.

2. Political Ranting. I don't mind a good, succinct, political opinion once in a while (@awrightbrian does this well). I do mind when people try to hold long, condescending political debates via twitter. I don't care if you pray to the church of Palin or if you think Obama is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it doesn't work with my way of using twitter. I always think that political debates on twitter are like political debates in a bar. You just know that at the exact moment the music dies down and the bar falls silent, you'll be caught yelling, "ANYBODY WHO GETS AN ABORTION DESERVES TO BE SHOT BY A FIRING SQUAD." Whether that's your opinion or not, context is needed to keep you from sounding like a douchebag. 140 characters doesn't leave room for context.

3. Nothing Original. If your every tweet is a retweet or link to something somebody else wrote, UNFOLLOW. If that content is so vital, I bet I'll find it without your help. (P.S. @twitcleaner is a great tool for quickly identifying accounts that do nothing but post unoriginal content.)

4. It's All About MEEEEE. Look, twitter is narcissistic by nature, but it is possible to notice that other people exist in this world. If you post links to your own blog over and over and over again, UNFOLLOW. If you post things like, "OMG! Look how awful my hair looks! I hope my fabulous-expensive-wouldn't-touch-your-hair-for-all-the-money-in-the-world hairdresser can fix it! SO EMBARRASSING!" along with a picture of your so-called embarrassing hair over and over and over, UNFOLLOW. You're free to throw your MEEEEEE Party, but I don't really want to attend.

5. Do As I Say. There's this thing that some parents do that makes my skin crawl. They repeatedly complain via twitter about how horrible/annoying/misbehaving/etc. their kids are, but between all of those complaints about how their kids are the spawn of Satan, they tell everybody else how to be a good parent. For example, if you tweet, "If this kid doesn't shut up soon, I'm going to shoot myself," and then reply to me saying Alexis is attempting to break the world record for most words formed out of one breath of oxygen with "I just use the Quiet Game and my kids are great!" UNFOLLOW. You can go ahead and use twitter as your means of getting sympathy from the world as you prove how smart you are, but I don't have to read it.

6. Drama Monger. There are people who loooooove to cause drama. They live for pointing out weaknesses, faults, mistakes, etc. They like to prove their superiority by cutting others down. That's fine, but I don't want to read it. Interestingly enough, it's the people who are Drama Mongers who are most likely to call someone out for unfollowing. It's a little, "Look! That person is a jerk! Poor me!" move, and I hate it. UNFOLLOW.

7. #Winner Is The New Loser. The horse is dead. Very dead. It's OK to stop beating it now. All of that is to say, OMG! ENOUGH WITH THE SHEEN TWEETS! I can't handle any more idolizing or laughing or enjoying of that whole dumb show, so UNFOLLOW. You go ahead and keep living last week's news, but I'm ready to move on. That's really hard to do when every other tweet in my stream is about him, y'know?

Like I said, I don't care if people want to use twitter in all of those ways, but I don't have to be there to see it. It's not that I don't like you, it's that we don't use twitter in the same way. Promise.

 

When the resident five-year old presents you with a picture of "tiger's blood," you can't unfollow her, but you can be SUPER ANNOYED.

Update on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 by burghbaby

A quick note: If I'm not following you on twitter, it doesn't mean you are guilty of any of that stuff. Assuming that might be a bit of a confession, though. ;-)

In all seriousness, I turned off new follower notifications right around the time I got six consecutive notifications from spam accounts that were all using a naked Britney Spears as their avatar. The only way I know a new follower is a real person is if they @ me once in a while, which makes sense given that I primarily use twitter as a conversation tool, no?

Rethinking A Few Little Somethings

They were long ago relegated to Basement Status, making them the least appreciated of all of the pets around here. The fish who lived in the 55-gallon freshwater aquarium were so unimportant in my eyes that I didn't even write about the middle-of-the-night-had-to-break-into-the-house transport thing that we did when we moved. I mean, who hasn't driven a pick-up truck full of fish and rocks in plastic tubs across town and then hid them in a house they didn't own?

(And THAT, my friends, is why we vehemently declined to do a final walk-through with the realtor before we closed on the house.)

So when an unexplained plague struck the tank and killed all but the two oldest residents, I didn't even blink. In fact, I might have had a little talk with the two survivors about how it would be OK if they just kicked the bucket like everyone else. How the hell does a cory fish live to be nine years old, anyway? It wasn't that I wished ill on any of the fish; it was that it would have been a relief to just tear down the tank until we saved up the money to convert it to a marine environment.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Those two fish just keep going and going and going, despite the utter and complete neglect that set in when all of the other fish died. Algae wrapped its way around every surface. A light bulb flickered constantly until it finally burned out. Water evaporated and wasn't replaced, rendering the pumps practically useless. And yet, the fish kept on going on.

A year went by and the tank turned into that thing I couldn't look at. I would avert my eyes every time I walked through the Man Cave, lest I be struck by an urge to drop everything and start scrubbing rocks. I had no desire to return the tank to its former glory days. None at all.

But then Mr. Husband got a wild hare up his butt and suddenly he made the time to scrub and scrub and scrub, to rinse and fill and clean, eventually turning the tank into a sparkly clean home for its two lowly residents. And that, of course, turned into him deciding it was time to replace the fish. Except, this time he swore he would allow Alexis to pick out the fish, instead of filling it with his usual preferred troupe of misfits and meanies (he's a cichlid and oscar sort of guy . . . he enjoys watching ugly fish rip each other to shreds, I guess).

Off to the store we went, Alexis eventually deciding that Mickey Mouse Platys were exactly her speed. Yellow and orange and red and black, several wound up in bags and were carried out to the car. As Alexis settled into her car seat, she begged to hold her new friends. Visions of fish flopping around uncontained on the inside of my new car filled my head, so instead I set them carefully beside her in the back. As Lady Gaga's voice began to fill the air, Alexis grinned and began to dance in her seat.

Alexis glanced down at her new fishy friends as she shook her money maker. "Dance, fishies, dance!" she told them. She began to giggle with glee as a bump in the road made it appear that they were heeding her command. All the way home she talked to the fish in the bags.

Once we returned to the house, Mr. Husband began floating the bags in the tank. Alexis stood close by, watching with wide-eyed pleasure. "Welcome home, fishies!" she said before beginning to name each and every one.

Not that the fish in the freshwater tank are important. To me.

The apparently are to Alexis.

With Friends Like These