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The fall of Twitter


The immediate motivation to write this article was this article on HBR "Its time to cut bank on Social Media" 

People who have been following me on Twitter by now know I have almost given up on it and people following my blog and stream as well know why I have give it up.

I keep coming back to it, again and again, the Twitter today is exponentially worse than it was when it started out. And it is getting nuttier and nuttier everyday. 

I do not intend to insult or insinuate any people out there, thats not the point, the point simply is this: Twitter earlier was a lake full of great and small fishes, today it is just an average lake with nothing special in it. Today if you were to look for great fishes here, you are most likely to get lost in the journey. The real problem is that you are unlikely to be aware of such a loss until its already damaging or too late.

To put it other way, Twitter was a great place to follow smart people. When it started out, it seemed as if only smart people were around, time-wasters, ranters, link-addicts and skirt chasers were all on FB or Orkut. But today we have seen a migration of all these 'elements' on to the twitter stream and its definitely polluting.

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It does not therefore come as a surprise that most of the smartest people I use to admire, follow and look up to, are barely on Twitter anymore. They are nowadays generous if they have five tweets a month! Most of the people who are smart and active, also have something - a product, a idea, a service, or a company - to sell to you these days.

Cutting down on the Twitter action has been massively good for my productivity, with no apparent loss in any information that will affect my actions at all! I can't explain that! I do sometimes miss the madness filled frenzy of attacking somebody or something like a pack of mad dogs on twitter. Such a thing and its temptation, thankfully is a thing of past. 

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For example: one of the smartest person I knew went from around 150-200 follows to 6000+ follows (when  I last checked). Interestingly, her activities fell sharply to near zero and today I am sure hates twitter.

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The problem is not the people per se but the noise. To put it blunt: From a conference table, Twitter has morphed into a fish market.

And doing something important even if cursorily using and under impact of such a noise is the worst thing that you can do for your profession and productivity.

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I find lots of good discussions happening at other forums where the digressions are near-zero and the noise levels are at good levels. The risk of operating in such an environment is less.

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To understand this, I cooked up a spreadsheet, with some common assumptions, to see how it affects.



Remember this is for a tweet count of 10 only! The worse the people are on the scale of sophistication, higher the tweet count is likely to be. This implies, that while the good people are likely to tweet less, less desirable people are gonna tweet like a clock; 40, 50, 100+ would be a minimum from them. This grossly skews noise-ratio to the maximum levels.

[The Risk-unit above is the assumed risk for exposing yourself to other ideas, dead-ends and low-productivity. Risk-manifest, another assumed unit, is calculation of such risks arising from the stream.]



Unsurprisingly, the chart of the risks to the number of follows goes exponential! It is important to remember this chart is fractal in nature, but obviously some amount of risk is actually very good, while over a limit and with high noise levels the results can be disastrous.

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Some ideas:

x. Don't tweet unless you have something very specific to say. Don't waste time on it.

x. This does not apply to you, if you have something to sell.

x. Don't follow people who have something to sell to you - even if they are gooood.

x. Follow the best of the best. There is absolutely no point in following the stupids and averages.

x. Follow people who add value to you

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