Twitter’s Biggest Problem: Tweets are Ads
19th April 2011
No, the biggest problem is that half the people who use it are from the left-hand side of the bell curve.
That said, of course tweets are ads. Whenever you have a medium of communication, there’s a certain portion of the population who are going to use that to try to get you to give them money, either for legitimate goods and services or for scams like Nigerian bank transfers or the ‘Democratic’ Party. Like spam, tweets are essentially free, so there’s nothing to prevent you from flooding the world except your own good manners (good luck with that). People who are trying to make money have much more incentive to participate in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ than normal people have to communicate, and eventually the noise drowns out the signal.
‘You can’t stop the signal, Mal.’
No, but you can sure as hell drown it out.