Well, it has been 13 years that I have had access to the internet. I remember the days with Yahoo! Chat and how people went from friendly talking to spam and porn flooding the major chatrooms. Then in Yahoo! Clubs and eventually Yahoo! Groups it went from people being friendly to people flaming each other or spamming to get ahead. Then it was MySpace and Facebook.
So, as a site goes mainstream, the price is that the quality is lacking. Even Trent Reznor (@trent_reznor) of Nine Inch Nails has outwardly been disgusted by the lack of maturity that has been growing in Twitter.
Now… Twitter. Over a year ago I joined Twitter and thought it was great. It was like a chatroom without the bulky and slow loading chat applet. I met friendly people and connected.
THEN… Twitter started going more mainstream once 2009 hit. With loads of companies joining and making a presence and people catching onto the idea, there are the people who are raising the dark side of Twitter. These people are encouraging others to gain lots of followers without actually making a connection or sharing some valuable information. There are children joining and bringing their world into Twitter. And some of those topics are not so great, even inappropriate. A couple weeks ago, there were some trending topics that were so vulgar (and I will not list them) that Twitter removed it within an hour.
Then there is the spam. From twitter trains, and twitter trains that are pyramid schemes (the ones that you have to join so many people to be able to get on the train, and be rotated through, plus there is a section to pay for a VIP or featured list), people are seeing “Get 100, 200, 400 followers a day!”
While you might get that many in a week, afterwards, your luck will fizzle out. People follow and unfollow, so you are not guaranteed that you will have followers, just the nice buzz from the words you read from these fooled people within your stream that have not gotten the concept of social networking.
What can Twitter do to eliminate this? Unless they tighten some boot straps, the spam might go on. What can you do as a user to eliminate this?
1. Ignore it
2. Block the user
3. Report it
With the ridiculous amount of trending topic hoaxes as of recent on Twitter, there should be trending topics to address this issue. Do you want Twitter to go down the social media crapper?
The biggest thing with Twitter is, they just don’t police it the way they should. When they do bother to police it, they suspend people who aren’t doing anything wrong, and leave the ones who are alone. They really need to start stepping back and taking a good long look at what is going on and take measures to fix it.
I hear you on that. I was suspended for 3 days and the excuse was that I had apparently visited another person’s profile. Well excuse me, but I was not born yesterday and I consider myself internet savvy.
Perhaps there should be people hired that use twitter a lot and can police it when Twitter is not within normal business hours. A lot of content goes up when it is not normal business hours.
I miss Twitter the way it used to be. I joined in November of 2006, and really enjoyed how close-knit and non-mainstream it was. Since mid to late 2008 it seems to have really gone downhill.
Don’t get me wrong… I still love Twitter and can’t imagine not using it. I just wish that companies weren’t so quick to jump on board. And I hate the follower spam crap.
The companies are not so bad, but it is mostly on the individual level that it can get bad, especially when they come up with a follow gimic. The big companies, I do not mind following as they might have some useful information.
On the individual level, people claim they are gurus or experts on certain areas, and then when you find out more, you are disappointed that they are not the real thing.