The Gimcrack Miscellany

People Are Beginning To Agree That Twitter Is Dumb

Posted on 11. Jun, 2009 by The Gimcracker in Television, Twitter Sucks

I read an interesting article called Orphaned Tweets about the large number of people that sign up for Twitter, post one tweet, and never return. Well good golly I’m not the only one then. Two interesting statements from the article are “10 percent of Twitter users account for 90 percent of the tweets” and “60 percent of users do not return from one month to the next”. Both facts are alarming and here’s why.

First of all you may be thinking that I should be happy about the 10 percent of users making up 90 percent of tweets due to my stance on what Twitter should be: a platform for subscribing to interesting/smart/famous people (a small number of total users), instead of for everyone in the world to post pointless tweets. But, the reason this statement is alarming is because the 10 percent should be closer to .10 percent. Think about it, if there are, let’s say, 70 million people on Twitter, 10 percent is 7 million. There aren’t 7 million interesting people on the Earth, let alone on Twitter. .10% of people should be making up 90% of tweets, just like .10% of people should be making up 90% of the music I listen to.

Secondly, the statement about 60 percent of users not returning from one month to the next is very alarming. That means that the majority of users that I come across on Twitter aren’t even there. What’s the use in following them or replying to their tweets if I’m not going to get a response? This number should be closer to 10 percent, not 60. I guess people sign up and then realize that there literally is nothing to do on Twitter.

Finally, here is a segment Conan O’Brien does to bash Twitter. It’s called TwitterTRACKER and it’s hilarious, but it also makes a good case for the argument that Twitter is stupid.