
Twitter Used to Be Great, Now It's a 'Prison'

Matt Lewis says it's become a haven for petty fights and snark
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 30, 2013 2:21 PM CST
Twitter Used to Be Great, Now It's a 'Prison'
The Twitter bird.   (Twitter)

(Newser) – Political writer Matt Lewis used to consider himself an "evangelist" for Twitter. No more, he writes at the Week. It's become "more of a hindrance than a help," more about imparting snark than useful information. More like a "prison." Lewis joined relatively early, in 2008, and was among the first journalists to use the site aggressively to tweet links and build a following. Eventually, though, everyone started using Twitter, and that's when things changed.

"Writers should be thinking of big ideas, but Twitter sucks you into small, petty battles," writes Lewis. "Like a game of whack-a-mole, you can end up chasing the things that irritate you—hoping to correct every misconception or lie." As a journalist, he can't leave Twitter completely, but he has changed how he uses the site—setting up select feeds and locking out strangers. Gone are those early days of interacting with everyone. "My guess is that as Twitter becomes meaner and coarser, more and more people will begin checking out," he writes. Given the site's lofty goal of offering a way to share information in a civil manner, "that's a shame." Read the full column here. (Read more Twitter stories.)

We use cookies. By Clicking "OK" or any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. Read more in our privacy policy.
Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X
https://www.newser.com/story/161947/twitter-used-to-be-great-now-its-a-prison.html
www.newser.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-33
255587
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PPVMWL4HYJDAD63VXJWMUTL2SJRRO376
<urn:uuid:2ac33b52-ceb6-4e75-9b7f-cd86a3ee74cb>
2022-08-10T23:46:12Z
40.114.51.62
text/html
sha1:EZ7OI7MDJE2YYGTT3C3GBI4JD23Y7H2H
<urn:uuid:71ab7c21-2771-4865-86fc-eb5095e2aec2>
https://www.newser.com/story/161947/twitter-used-to-be-great-now-its-a-prison.html
response
<urn:uuid:63139529-6db8-4847-8db4-09e0c26b1fc0>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-33
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-115
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/