photo: topgold

Twitter is a very cool thing. It makes it easy to find people with similar interests. It makes finding people you live near easier. I have met many of my current friends on Twitter. Because of Twitter, I am now on the InRetroSpection podcast. Long story short, it’s pretty cool. There is darker side, however. An annoying side. I don’t know if it’s due to ignorance or apathy, but I have isolated the top 5 things that need to die in order to make Twitter a better place.

5. Broken links- This one isn’t so bad, it’s just annoying. Someone posts something I want to read and I click the link and nothing happens. These days, this is almost inexcusable with every single article having a Tweet button that does the work for you. Even if it doesn’t, there are services like Bitly that will tweet a link to any page with the link already shortened and everything. You can do it! You have the power!

4. Auto DM’s- This is not a good idea. Ever. For those that don’t know, the way an Auto DM works is you follow someone and then within a few minutes of that follow you have a direct message from them. It says something generic like “Thanks for the follow! Looking forward to your Tweets!” or something similar. The worst offenders are the ones that include a link. Are you serious with this hot garbage? I literally just initiated contact with you and you assume that our first communication should be me clicking on some strange link? Whoever told you that was a good idea is well, let’s say confused to be nice.

3. Murderers of the English Language- We’ve all seen these. You need a language analyst to figure out what they said. Forget punctuation, many people can’t even spell. I actually saw someone yesterday tweet the word “Kan’t” and I wept. In retrospect, I wish I had taken a screen capture.

2. Discussing Your Sexual “Prowess”- For everyone’s sake, I am not even going to give you specific examples of this one, but I can imagine most of you have seen these people. Almost always guys graphically discussing how they “please the ladies” so to speak. Thanks for the PSA, fellas. I can’t possibly imagine how I could go on with my life if hadn’t known these facts that you just made up. I’m sure every one of these tweets gets you hundreds, if not thousands of dates. You lucky boys, you.

1. fllwrs.com & unfollowers.me- This is number 1 because its currently the most annoying thing on Twitter to me personally. You’re following someone and for whatever reason, you decide to unfollow them. Maybe they did one of the other 4 things in this post. Maybe they are just plain uninteresting to you. Some people have subscribed to these services that will publicly call you out for unfollowing them. Give me a break. That is about the weakest thing I have ever heard of. It has no end goal. Are you trying to shame me into following you again? Are you just trying to make sure I know I unfollowed you? The second I see this, that person gets an instant block. Try being more interesting. Try interacting with me regularly. I never unfollow someone I have actual conversations with, do you? If you absolutely have to make a mention of it, how about something like, “Hey, I noticed you unfollowed me. Can I ask why?” I would answer that. I would not block you. That is a fair and honest question which I would answer in kind.

These are the things that bug me on Twitter. I know they’re not going anywhere, but I bet some of these get to you, too. Did I miss any? Do you have one you’d like to share? Do you disagree? Let me know in the comments.