Three weeks ago I pulled the plug on my Twitter account. Almost a year ago I had fallen head over heels for that service, and when I finally cut the cord I felt as if I had pulled my head out of the internet’s ass and took a breath of fresh air.

Twitter is the cool kid’s table all over again. It’s a positive-feedback system that perpetuates the position of those with the most followers and steals the lunch money from the nerds. Sour grapes, I know. But hear me out.

Meet Devrin

Devrin just signed up for Twitter. Exciting! He posts a message:

Hello, world!

Not brilliant, but it’ll do for an inaugural post. Besides, he has so much to tell the world! He’ll beguile the internet with his 140-character wit and steal their hearts! He’ll have many thousands of followers!

Devrin recovers from his unbridled enthusiasm and ventures into Twitter’s deep bowels. “I must find someone to follow,” he thinks. And follow he does: the first victim is none other than John Gruber, Merlin Mann follows, and Steven Frank is felled soon thereafter. Devrin goes to his timeline and admires it. His post, alongside the likes of those three! He feels moved to post again:

This is super cool!

And quits Twitter forever — or not. He should have. In reality it took 52 weeks and a few hundred “tweets” before he gathered the intestinal fortitude to do it.

Some Background

When Twitter was released it garnered naught but harsh words. No one could see any merit in a system that restricted you to 140 characters. “It’s a waste of bandwidth,” they decided. And moved on.

Twitter exploded a little more than a year later. Suddenly bloggers decided that Twitter was the Next Big Thing and rang up accounts. Their dutiful readerships followed suit, creating accounts for the sole purpose — as I did — of reading their favorite blogger’s tweets. And bloggers loved it: their audience at their fingertips! Have a question? No problem! Tweet it and — zing! — you’ve got answers!

The unexpected explosion melted Twitter’s servers. And now the Big Thing to blog was Twitter’s unreliability: what kind of self-respecting service has hours of downtime? And the slashdot effect increased Twitter’s problems. And users. Today, a bit later, things seem to be running more stably.

Hey You Up There! Twitter Sucks!

Why did Twitter’s first reviewers find so much to hate? They had no audience. Twitter was like writting letters and dropping them on the ground. A little while later these same people were back on Twitter lavishing praise because — neat! — all of sudden there were all these people that wanted to read this crap you threw on the ground! Before 140 characters was an arbitrary limitation, now it’s “inspired” and “revolutionary.” What the heck changed?

The people calling the shots now like Twitter. It’s this New Medium that connects people. In reality it’s a big rat race for followers and favorited tweets. Not for those on the top — for those on the bottom. The basement of Twitter is one big Digg comment thread; it’s the usual mix of ep1c fa1lz, brb bathroom, and OMG! coot puppys! It’s as if you could create a site that looked like Facebook to the guys on top and MySpace to those beneath.

The only people that anyone follows — even the popular users — are the popular users. Strange! This is how Twitter fails: there’s no way to discover users. Sure, point me to the search bar. Point me to “follows” list on everyone’s page. But there’s no way for me to find users that talk about the same stuff I do. Twitter doesn’t put me in touch with these people. Twitter doesn’t forge new connections, it only reproduces the blog & audience relationship that already exists. That’s how Twitter fails. That’s why Twitter sucks.

Twitter is your high school lunchroom where the uncool kids are too busy peering over each other to get a glimpse of the cool table to even notice each other.

One Year Later

And so a year later, thoroughly disillusioned, I pull the plug. Some will read this and agree.

But the vast majority will — I feel — think, “You dolt. You can’t say you don’t like Twitter and because of that Twitter as a whole sucks.” Point taken. Maybe there are those that actually have friends on Twitter — how’d you swing that? — or those that use it because they enjoy reading tweets from those on high. Fair enough. But to the latter: that’s not what Twitter is for. They provide RSS feeds if that’s all you want.

Too many people join Twitter because they hear that it’s awesome. This is to you: don’t. It’s not.