Back when “social media” was getting going, I was invited to Facebook by just about everyone I knew. I was familiar with the platform, but it is did not interest me. I’m just not that interesting nor am I all that interested in sharing my life with the world. I kept getting pestered so I relented and setup my page. I used fake information, of course, and set about friending all my friends, family and acquaintances. They, in turn, friended me and before long my “timeline” was full of the comings and goings of many people I know.

It did not take long to confirm my suspicions. Not only am I not very interesting, but my coevals are not that interesting either. Posts about gratifying bowel movements, pics of vacation trips, and updates on kids I did not know or care about got boring quickly. For fun I would find a moonbat page and harass the moonbats therein – until I was blocked, which happened quickly. A few years ago I shuttered my account and that was the end of it. A few friends asked why and I lied, saying I was spending too much time on it.

With the blog doing well, I signed up for twitter, thinking that a) I could get ideas and b) I could promote the blog. Plus, I thought I should take a closer examination of twitter. On the first point, I do get some post ideas on occasion. Of course, that means following people and things that I may not like. The NYTimes or TED Talks are two obvious examples. The second point has not produced much. I get some traffic from twitter, but not a whole lot. At least not a lot from my very modest efforts.

The thing about twitter, is it appears to be suffering from a tragedy of the commons. Because it is free to be on twitter, you have loads of people on twitter. They are there for content, presumably created by other users. Writers, bloggers, news sites, celebrities, weirdos, etc. post their stuff on twitter and you pick through it, like a hobo picking through the dumpsters. The standard model for the theory is that the number of takers will exceed the number of contributors. A cascading effect ensues where the takers increase geometrically and contributors abandon the project.

That’s not what’s happening with twitter. Instead, you have far too many contributors. Every nitwit with something on his mind is littering every post worth reading. One nugget of interest is therefore wrapped in a thick coating of stupid. To break through the noise, bloggers and news sites rat-a-tat-tat their twitter posts, usually promoting their site. Kathy Shaidle is some sort of twitter bot, sending dozens at one clip promoting her work. Multiply this over thousands and thousands of people and even a small twitter account like mine is a tidal wave of useless redundant data.

The worst offenders are the major news sites. I’m assuming they hire interns to feed a twitter bot of some sort. Maybe they have automated it from the content management systems. The redundancy suggest it is humans or really bad coding. I’ll get the same story from the NYTimes fifty times in a day. A site called TechCrunch was so bad I stopped following it, even though some of their stuff was of interest. This strikes me as a problem that can only get worse.

Initially, twitter was probably a great promotional vehicle. As more people piled on, however, the people using is had to invest more in promoting themselves through twitter. That just increases the noise leading to more and more people doing the same. Users will then be incentivized to follow far fewer people in order to minimize the traffic. I dropped quite a few sites for this reason.

The other thing I noticed that I think is worth mentioning is that some people seem to get hooked on twitter like people get hooked on exotic porn. Their posting gets increasingly manic and strange, like they are chasing some sort of unattainable high. They have these deranged 140 character interactions with other twitter-tweakers that are loaded with abbreviations and references to previous tweets. Some of it is alcohol fueled. Greg Gutfeld gets drunk and hits twitter, but there definitely seems to be some twitter induced psychosis that I’m not getting. I guess it is like gambling. Either you get the high from the spinning wheels or you don’t.

I don’t think I get it. There’s pretty much nothing I need to say that is under 140 characters. Those things can be handled with a nod or a grunt when someone asks me if I need more beer or pizza. Everything else exceeds those limits and I’m not interested in learning the weird pidgin language of twitter.