I’m sympathetic to what Matt says here, but I think he misses the bigger value of Twitter snark: as long as journalists and experts use Twitter for social ends (whether by telling the best snarky joke or whatever) their participation in the medium will remain at least somewhat grounded.
The alternative is to make the professionalization of Twitter complete. I already have quite enough of that, thanks — I don’t need more of people pushing their day’s clips at me through pathetically thin news-hook framing in what amounts to a really shitty, lossy RSS reader. Who would want that? I know it’s fun when you’re the one staring at ChartBeat (I do it all the time!), but for the people on the other end of the equation it’s a drag, even if they don’t realize it.
The great thing about Twitter is that you can absorb the thinking of and even interact with people who have a huge amount of expertise, who might be inaccessible via other means. They’re steeped in whatever it is they work on constantly, and if you follow them you’ll start to understand their perspective and vocabulary. But that works best when they’re being honest. Honesty means direct, non-calculated, first-order interaction with the medium. And that won’t happen unless they’re able to satisfy human drives other than the need for clickthroughs, which to be honest seems like it might not have even been in Maslow’s hierarchy in the first draft.
I’m glad that Nick Beaudrot has figured out that he wants to interact with Twitter on a more limited basis, I wish him luck with his self-promotion-only strategy, and if I had been following him before now I would cease doing so immediately.
UPDATE: It occurs to me that I wrote something similar a few years ago. The framing’s different, but the upshot — that social network users attempting to avoid trivial content become a free rider problem — seems relevant.
