djwonk

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that it is personal.  Sometimes it is funny, sometimes serious. With the people I follow at least, the ethos feels pretty good. However, I’ve recently gotten many twitters in a row (echo chamber style) that are quite clearly all about marketing. Apparently, some of my friends have been hijacked by marketing machines. I hope they come back — I miss them!

I don’t know how other people feel about this, but it seemed like an unwelcome departure from the tone that I’m used to on Twitter. Some of these messages are from people that I respect and like very much. But I don’t like the direction it is going.

The world has, more or less, figured out the norms surrounding email, instant messaging, and IRC. But we have some learning and back-and-forth to do when it comes to Twitter.

I guard my attention. When the noise-to-signal ratio increases, a communication channel becomes less valuable.  When a threshold is crossed, I turn it off. On Twitter, that means that I’m not going to follow people that generate too much noise. Especially if that noise is impersonal marketing.