American hospitals are filling up with victims. Not of stabbings or terror attacks. These are victims of Twitter #abuse. On Valentine’s Day, 14 bloggers were rushed to Mount Sinai with life-threatening snark bites. Police blame the deadly snark attack on a #cyberbullying gang called HashHoles. The attacks may be linked to hundreds of half-baked opinions published by sites like Daily Beast, HuffPo and Engadget. Several of the terminal bloggers asked friends to burn their bodies on Twitter’s corporate campus, between sushi courses. “Choke on your edamame, bigots!” one blogger tweeted before taking a poison-tipped hashtag to the groin.
Thankfully, the end of The Great Twitter War is near. Twitter is dying, despite a braintrust of bloggers who think fixing “rampant abuse” can save it. Protecting Twitter’s delicate victims from iBullying or #harassment won’t make a dent in Twitter’s demise. Same way tastier hummus won’t save Iraq and Dancing With The Stars can’t resuscitate Bill Cosby.
The 3 real reasons Twitter is failing are:
- No one needs it. It doesn’t solve any problem for most people besides celebrities and journalists. Facebook has your friends. Instagram has celebrities and others for you to envy. And Pinterest lets you hoard pictures of shit you’ll never buy and places you’ll never go. And SnapChat diligently erases photos of all the body parts your kids shouldn’t have photographed.
- On Twitter, not only are most users not harassed, they are invisible. They’re tweeting into an empty abyss with no followers and no one reading their cries for attention. No one. They’d feel lucky to get “harassed”. At least it would show some poor sucker actually read some gibberish they hurled at Justin Bieber. Charles Manson has more Tinder dates than most people have Twitter followers.
- Twitter is littered with bots and fake accounts. There’s barely a human left Tweeting besides Kanye West – and he just wants to borrow money…to help the world….with his ideas.
The reason bloggers are so misguided in their analysis is: they are media people – on major platforms like Engadget, The Atlantic, or Harvard Business Review. They’re a tiny, tiny fraction of the population – and juuuuust prominent enough to register a pulse on Twitter. The rest never showed up, left, or chirp to a narrow group of peers.
In 2013, I wrote in Forbes how unrepresentative Twitter’s population is. Little has changed. There’s one guy I see on there constantly. He has 400,000 Tweets!! I can only hope his wife had the sense to leave him – and smash his router on the way out.
What worries me most is when Twitter gets MySpaced in a year, hashtag warriors might actually have to buy clothes and go outside to protest. Just kidding. They’d never leave the house. #DieNaked!
– Steve Faktor
PS – Comedian Jordan Cooper did a funny expletive-filled rant about this on his podcast. Check it out.