How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag | Hacker News Reader

How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag

darowski.com

50 pointstwism11 comments

Am I the only one who couldn't get past the author's tone. I'll paraphrase the way I read it: "Hey kids, I've been doing this a long time, and I know what do to, and you are doing it wrong, so listen to me... And by the way your a douchebag." He comes across as elitist -- about Twitter!

Twitter is an open service and you can do with it what you like as long as it is within the terms of service. That is it.

It was kind of condescending, but I see where he's coming from. Basically, he's saying "a lot of people on Twitter tweet annoyingly. Here are some major offenses that people should avoid."

And the tone probably made it a more effective piece of writing. The putting-off effect of his tone is counteracted by people being more likely to read it because it sounds more extreme/interesting and people's desire to avoid being a "douchebag", which is stronger than their desire not to be "someone who tweets kind of annoyingly."

That said, it was kind of annoying and elitist. But for accomplishing his goal of getting the most people to remedy these poor tweeting habits the most, it was probably more effective than just complaining about annoying ways people tweet.

The @ reply information is useful, the rest is obvious and I'm guessing that if you are a douchebag then you won't follow his advice.

I'm not so sure... some people jump into Twitter without knowing much about it. If they "meet" the wrong people at the beginning, they may adopt behaviours that those noisy and spammy individuals think are ok, without actually being comfortable with them themselves.

Sometimes, you're a douche because you're a douche. Sometimes, you're a douche because you don't know better (yet).

I don't see much of it as "douchebag" on Twitter, obviously there's some who are just playing the numbers game etc, but Twitter is obviously also an effective marketing tool.

Using Twitter to make money isn't really the same as being a douchebag. Of course for users at the receiving end, it's irritating, but you can't blame people who have flocked to Twitter to promote and market.

or can you ?

I never understood this mentality, how is it ok if it's for promoting/marketing purpose ?

how is making money always ok ?

I didn't say it's ok, I'm just saying it's not necessarily 'douchebag' behavior, if Twitter is setup in a way that makes it very attractive for marketing/promotion.

I didn't know the details of the reply stuff. That's good to know. I also hope people stop the automatic DM with each follow. That really is annoying.

If I follow somebody and they auto-DM me with some canned message, I immediately unfollow them. It really is a douchebag-indicator.

The point I liked the best was 6. Don’t break the system. I know people loved the see all tweets option, but 97% of us had it turned off for a reason. Adding a character to the front of a tweet (which thankfully seems to be stopping) just inconveniences your followers because you're trying to make a point. I don't appreciate that.

Twitter is infested with these "social media experts", aka multi-level marketing assholes. It's quite annoying.

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