A puddle of disgust

In his post The end of Big Twitter and the follow up posts more on Twitter and Twitter's changes Alan Jacobs sum up his and others' frustrations with the way Twitter has developed over recent years.

From the inception Twitter was for many a place were they engaged in riveting discussions, and made new interesting acquaintances. Slowly, but very noticeably, the noise ratio has increased to an unbearable level.

I think this has happened mainly because people have stopped behaving politely when interacting with other persons online, as if they were visiting another person's house, and are now feeling at home and behave like themselves. We now see people's bad sides, something we all have, but should have enough self moderation not to show off in public.

Some people don't shy away from using Twitter as a dump for their most thoughtless comments, shooting hateful remarks from the hip, and "trying to win unwinnable arguments with strangers who don’t matter in our lives at all", as Alan puts it.

For many (it seems like), using Twitter boils down to constantly checking for new Tweets, being ready to respond quickly in public to comments posted by (somewhat) anonymous strangers.

I understand why Manton Reece is concerned about hosting user generated content on the micro-blogging product he is working on.

Maybe the inherent nature of a realtime publishing platform, where you can get instant unmoderated feedback, is to end up as a puddle of disgust.