Tweetie was the first iPhone Twitter client worth having. Loren Brichter started out on the iPhone team at Apple, and after it shipped, he started his own company and produced Tweetie – which included a landmark innovation. By scrolling to the top of the page and continuing to scroll, the “rubber-band-“ effect would do more than just be a visual marker: it would actually trigger a reload. All you had to do was keep flicking, and you could constantly reload the Twitter stream to see new content. And just to put too fine a point on it, if you dragged far enough, you got a sort of slot-machine wheel that would pop up three birds.
Loren’s on-the-nose Easter egg has come to sum up the Twitter experience for me. This time last year, I had six distinct Twitter accounts with their own functions and purposes. Of those, one is defunct and another is rarely touched. Two of the others have been deleted outright. I have a “public” account, a “professional” account that links to my real identity, and a “personal” account which is locked down tight.
But more to the point, I don’t use them as much. When I blew away those two Twitter accounts, with them went a couple hundred mutual followers and the bulk of my day-to-day socialization. I rarely do much with any account but the “personal” one, which has maybe two dozen followers, and while I like being able to keep up with people, it’s such a firehose of everything in the world I want to avoid that barely a day goes by where I don’t have to log out and quit the browser to try to forestall going back and looking again and again and getting even more out of sorts.
Twitter really is the slot machine, the gameification of attention – at any given moment, if I load Twitter and scroll through it, I have roughly a 20% chance of seeing something I’ll be glad I saw, a 30% of seeing something I’ll be angry I saw, and a 50% chance of something of no interest. That’s bad arithmetic, and it’s happened even after weeding down two or three times to get to a tightly curated private group with only the things I’m likely to want to see. And the problem there is – you can’t even control for those things, because there’s so much to be outraged about, there’s no escaping it short of tapping out altogether. People speak ominously about a “filter bubble” and yes, it’s problematic when people only get a drumbeat of their preferred propaganda rather than any sort of factual news, but at some point you have to balance being informed against being driven insane. Right now, Twitter is a piss-poor tool for achieving that balance, and that may be sullying the good name of piss.
But then, Twitter – and Facebook, which I resolutely refuse to use on a more than bimonthly basis – have a lot to answer for in general. Of which.