Why if you call Twitter a “social network”, you’re a cunt
The case for not calling Twitter a social network
When it comes to connections, Twitter doesn’t have ‘friendships’ as such. It is entirely based on one-way connections; you follow someone you find interesting but they don’t have to follow you back, nor should you expect them to. If someone finds your tweets interesting or your @ replies engaging then you can get to know someone on Twitter and become mutual followers.
With a social network you have to request someone as a friend and it has to be verified by the other person. It’s a service for people you already know in real life to index your online presence, rather like a phonebook or contact list, and of course to show the world how many people you know.
You’re not obligated to follow people you know in real life on Twitter. But with Facebook, you kind of are obligated to accept their friend request, because you can always take them off of your homepage and stop your status updates reaching them. But that’s what Facebook is for. While it’s often useful to follow people you know on Twitter (the #bskcrew, for example) because you can keep people updated with relevant local news and info and organise meet-ups. But just because that kid you never spoke to who used to sit across from you in English class in school is on Twitter, doesn’t mean you will end up necessarily following each other, even though that’s exactly the kind of person we populate our social network friends list with.
Also on social networking sites you have a profile page. Twitter’s ‘profile’ field is a 160 character bio that’s optional to fill in. Twitter doesn’t list any contact details and it doesn’t have a page full of your favourite music. It doesn’t have photo albums and it doesn’t have Flash games where you can swap cows with your aunt. Not that there’s anything wrong with this stuff, but they’re strictly social network things and that’s not what Twitter is.
You could argue, of course, that you can use Twitter to network with people socially, and so it deserves the description. But it’s kind of a new term and while yes Twitter might fit the literal wording, it doesn’t fit the idea that the phrase was coined to describe.
But people have made friends on the internet since it started and nobody’s bothered to call messaging boards or IRC ‘social networks’. Probably because they lack profile pages and photo albums and lists of favourite bands, and the only way to identify a user is by their username (and on a forum they might have a small, square avatar).
So?
Okay, up to this point, all I’ve done is say I think it’s wrong to classify Twitter as a social network. I haven’t got to the point where it makes you a cunt.
It’s because, you bunch of dickholes, now everyone wants in. If there’s one thing that average internet users can do really well, it’s ruin a web service with their presence. Once upon a time, Facebook was only open to university students. Remember that? It was a useful tool for organising events and keeping in contact with new university friends. Those were the days. But, of course, it’s for socially networking. So everyone needs to be on it so you have a complete set of people you know in a handy list. Your aunts and uncles are on it. Your ten-year-old sister is on it. People’s grandparents are on it. Emotional teenagers are on it. But that’s fine. We can deal with that because that’s what Facebook is for. But then someone said that Twitter is the new social network du jour and like the bandwagon-jumping pricks they are, a whole teeming mass of ill-educated, unfunny, culturally and educationally bankrupt people have swarmed in and are ruining it. They’ve heard it’s a social network and so they’re trying to use it like it’s “the new Facebook” or similar… they’re getting all their friends to sign up and diluting all the nice people with horrible people. And they don’t understand that it’s normal for people to follow each other because of shared interests, not because of some real-life meeting. They don’t know that’s what the nice part of the internet is about.
So you’ll get some tossers who, for no reason, delete you as one of their followers even though it doesn’t affect them in any way to have a particular follower. If a person is @ replying you with shit then there’s a handy block function but removing a follower because you don’t know them is not how Twitter is supposed to work you fucking cock muncher argh fuck all this
TL;DR butthurt over being deleted from following someone