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Twitter is the second-most popular social networking site behind Facebook.  Journalists use it as a means to dispense news quickly and before their counterparts when a story can’t wait until the morning to be published.

Twitter is also used as a vehicle for celebrities to connect with their fans.  People with no lives can get a glimpse into their favorite celebrities’ insights 140 characters, or less,  at a time.  They eat it up, for some reason.

Twitter has also been used by normies (normal people) to report the news.  Twitter was used by participants in the Egyptian revolution and protestors of the OWS movement to report news that mainstream media wouldn’t or didn’t want to report.

In short, Twitter is extremely popular and wildly successful.  I have a confession to make, though.  Twitter sucks.  I can’t stand it.  I like nothing about it.

.

Ugh. Just reading the name annoys me.

But Twindaddy, StuphBlog has a Twitter account.

Yeah, it does.  Shut up.  We have a Twitter account because WordPress says that this is a good way to publicize the blog and expand our number of followers.  That is it!  I like it not!  But I’ll take one for the team.

So without further ado (that’s the second time I’ve gotten to use that word today), here is a list of reasons why I hate Twitter.

  1. Twitter, to me, is just a stripped down version of Facebook or Google+.  Yes, you read that correctly.  That’s all it is.  It’s basically you answering Facebook when it asks you what’s on your mind.  It’s the Status Update part of Facebook and Google+.  Nothing more, nothing less.
  2. The 140 character limit.  Facebook used to have a character limit, but it wisely discovered that sometimes people have more to say than what will fit inside of 140 characters.  Now you can use as many as you like.  Twitter, however, has not caught on to this yet.

    It also makes it hard to follow people who post more than 140 characters at a time.  Why?  Because the last part of the sentences shows up in your timeline before the first part of the sentence.  So as you’re scrolling down from the top you see the last half of a sentence and you’re wondering if someone is really stupid or did they tweet twice?  Then, if you’re following multiple people,  you have to scroll through a multitude of tweets to get to the first tweet.  Then you have to scroll back up when you’re down to read the tweets that were tweeted between the first tweet and the last tweet of one freakin’ sentence.  Are you confused by my explanation?  Me, too.  How annoying.

    The 140 character limit, along with each generation of Americans getting dumber and lazier, has contributed to the butchering of the English language.  On Twitter, you now equals u, people now equals ppl, what now equals wat, and so on.  As a recovering grammar Nazi, this gets on my damn nerves.

    Really? Are you too busy to add a few extra letters?

  3. Tweets.  Why on earth are they called tweets?  What a horrible, horrible word.  Look, tweeting is something birds do, not humans.
  4. Retweets.  Nothing is so great that it should be “tweeted” again.  It’s bad enough something was tweeted to begin with.
  5. Hashtags.  What the hell is up with hashtags?  There has to be a better was to make tweets searchable than hashtags.  Plus, a hashtag can have no spaces.  So if I want Twitter sucks big donkey balls as my hashtag then I have to type #twittersucksbigdonkeyballs.  That makes it hard sometimes to tell where one word ends and the other begins.  Kind of stupid, isn’t it?
  6. There’s no privacy for what you tweet.  Every tweet is public.  At least on Facebook or Google+ you can choose who can see it.  The only privacy option on Twitter is to make your entire page private.

    So it’s all or nothing? Awesome.

    So you can either choose to make all tweets private or none of them.  It’s absolute.  No compromise.  How idiotic.

  7. When somebody tweets at (@) you, you don’t get notified.  At least I don’t.  If you want to know if someone has interacted with you on Twitter  you have to go searching for it.
  8. Twitter is difficult to navigate.  Or maybe cumbersome is the more appropriate word.  If, for instance, I want to see who has tweeted @ me since I last logged in, I have to click on the @ Connect button and then on either Interactions or Mentions.  It doesn’t sound difficult, but it took me forever to figure that out.  On Facebook or Google+ you have a notifications bar and by clicking on it you can go right to the interaction.

Twitter, as far as my blog is concerned, is a necessary evil.  I want my blog to do well so I’ll embrace the platform that Twitter offers in order to help promote my blog.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.  And you can’t make me.