Noahbrain of the noahpinionblog wrote perhaps the stupidest tweet ever:
Why do so many rightists love anonymity? Is it because it gives them more of a feeling of homogeneity and commonality?
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) September 6, 2014
Let’s see…who are the ones going batshit over NSA, drones, Facebook, Gmail, etc? Liberals and civil libertarians, mostly. Conservatives understand there is a tradeoff between freedom and security and that freedom and anarchy are not mutually inclusive. Libs go on about securing the border from physical threats, but somehow think that email and Facebook are off-limits, that somehow terrorists still live in the 9th century and have no clue how to communicate digitally.
It’s also interesting to note how Noah’s account has about 20,000 followers, but his tweet only got seven unique engagements. That a response rate of .035%! Terrible.
Even though I think twitter was a brilliant idea and has a lot of potential as a media broadcasting tool, the site is terrible in many ways. 80-90% of people’s followers are fake/inactive and, as evidence of this, out of a 1000 followers, maybe two or three will re-tweet or favorite your stuff. The level of engagement relative to the number of followers is extremely low and probably due to a combination of all the fake and inactive accounts. The 140 character limit sometimes results in poorly punctuated, incoherent tweets. Sometimes users will make multiple tweets at once to express a full thought to get around the the 140 limit. The future of twitter is less about individuals broadcasting tweets and more about receiving updates from very large, established accounts like celebrities and news sources.