Technology

You Can't Hate Twitter if You Don't Get Twitter

In one of the most talked-about columns on social media today, The Week columnist Matt Lewis tries to explain how he got trapped in the "prison" of Twitter's apparent decline — even though he's really just trapped himself, by way of a really bad Twitter feed.

By Rebecca Greenfield
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

In one of the most talked-about columns today, titled simply "Why I Hate Twitter," The Week columnist Matt Lewis tries to explain how he got trapped in the "prison" of Twitter's apparent decline — even though he's really just trapped himself, by way of a lame Twitter feed.

When he joined back in 2008, Lewis writes, he loved Twitter for the sense of community (and the page views it generated), but of late he says it has turned into a "dark place" with a bunch of "cynics and partisan cranks." This very real deterioration in quality, however, is a thing of Lewis's own making. Lewis, after all, hand-picked all those "cynics" and "cranks" as people he wanted to follow, as The Awl's Choire Sicha noted. Looking through the 5,067 (!) users followed by @MattkLewis, it's no wonder this Daily Caller contributor hates Twitter so much. Using an app called ShadowMe, The Atlantic Wire took a quick look at what Twitter looks like to Lewis. That's his reality on the right over there. As you can see, his feed could use a little trimming. Lucky for him, we have some suggestions.

Within just a few seconds of perusing Lewis's feed we came across the following tweets that, if deleted from his life, might make him a happier contrarian columnist. Call it an unfollow list:

How about Riyaz Patel? This person doesn't have too many followers, but he or she does spit out a few things each day, like this bit of useless information:

Or, what about the cynic Chloe Elizabeth? She does hate people, you know:

Then there is Trena Nelson, who appears to be a spam bot. Matt Lewis is following a spam bot:

And this is basically a look-what-I'm-eating-for-lunch tweet from Warwick Davis:

These were just a few of the noteworthy, useless tweets that we saw in a few minutes of browsing. Lewis could do some major purging, and then maybe he wouldn't hate Twitter so much — and we'd all be spared having to have this sort of discussion all day.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.