Twitter goddamn useless: the WWW equivalent of scribbling on the bathroom wall

History doesn't record who got the story 2 minutes before anyone else. History does record who was wrong.

 

Not liking Twitter is like not liking sabermetrics. It doesn't make sense to not like it, just use it correctly.

 

Remember, "Wow. Just wow." is the new "Wow."

Make sure you use it 17 times a day for eleventy-thousand years.

 

But what is good judgment re: Twitter?

Rumors with zero fact checking and simply linking to another site get posted on here all the time (see Friends reunion thread) --- and we're supposed to be journalists. And we expect the 99 percent of Twitter users who aren't journalists to use it correctly?

"Ah, but this isn't my newspaper/radio show/blog/TV report. I don't have to exercise the same caution and standards here that I do in the real world."

Oh? And why not?

Getting something wrong, posting something wrong --- any place, any time, on any medium --- should make a journalist's gut hurt.

I don't sense that at all. Not here. And not much of anywhere.

 

So don't follow the people who screw up a lot and don't have standards for what they tweet.

I follow a hell of a lot of people, but I never see the tweets that are given as examples of the evils of Twitter because I don't follow the yokels who post those things.

 

Why, precisely, does one have to like Twitter?

 

We've been using that around here for years and then it fell out favor.
We're Hipsters!!!!

 

What if someone calls my momma a whore?

 

Is she?

 

Whores and sluts aside, 88 percent of what's on Twitter is absolutely useless.

 

That's why it's crucial to follow the right people, not follow the wrong people and learn to use search well.