It sucks. It blows. It’s useless. It’s too expensive. It feels too cheap. It doesn’t do enough. It’s too complex. They don’t care.
Bitching is such a succinct form of expression. It doesn’t require or usually entail deep analysis. It’s the easiest way to write something “interesting”. Readers flock to controversy, dissent, and drama. The words of bitching are short and carry plenty of punch for that drama.
This makes bitching a perfect fit for the 140 characters of Twitter.
It takes a lot less work than writing a blog entry, but gives you the same rush of making your voice heard. Telling it to The Man. Shout “so what are you gonna do about it?” (after the other guy left the bar). It opens up the process of wide-area bitching to a whole new group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone public with their opinion — or even realized they had one.
That’s not a slam on Twitter, by the way. I’ve been truly impressed with the other kinds of behavior and new forms of interaction that it is fostering. For the more creative outlets, the 140 character limit is a brilliant limitation.
Rather, I think it’s just a form fit for the human desire to find fellowship in dissent. Twitter made it as easy to post “it sucks” as it is to think it. And with no draft mode or no need to fill in paragraphs of thought before pressing publish, there’s little time for rewrites or regret.
That will undoubtedly lead to some very special, inciteful bite-size nuggets of opinion that would not otherwise be shared. But we’ll have to chew through a lot of fat to get to the meat.
Chico Felipe
on 15 Apr 08A blog post bitching about bitching on twitter. Sounds like it is turtles all the way down….
John S.
on 15 Apr 08http://twitter.com/johnsheehan/statuses/789857170
;)
rick
on 15 Apr 08See also: Abort, Retry, or EPIC FAIL from waxy.org.
Twitter reminds me a lot of kvetch.com, only with user names.
Marc Lehmann
on 15 Apr 08I haven’t found this. Maybe it’s just who you happened to be connected to more than twitter the medium itself. Technology that elicits certain types of responses from people is something I definitely believe in, so I’ll be watching twitter with your glasses for a while to see if you are on to something. Interesting post!
Dallas
on 15 Apr 08You think twitter is bad, check out Riled Up It’s nothing BUT controversy.
*Disclaimer, We designed it. But we don’t control it or it’s content. I’m not trying to promote the site, but I think it’s interesting the turn the user generated content has taken.
Bruce
on 15 Apr 08It’s also useful for other ego-stroking purposes, like epiphanies, words of wisdom, funny things, and true-to-life bits. Really, it captures what geeks like to do: muse, rant, rave, and feel important.
Mathew Patterson
on 16 Apr 08That’s true, but I also see a lot of posts in the format “I’m totally loving right now” or or .
Perhaps it is more that 140 characters doesn’t leave a lot of room for considered, balanced opinions.
Mathew Patterson
on 16 Apr 08Tags eaten by the blog there – the format is “I’m totally loving product right now” or person or entertainment
Giles Bowkett
on 16 Apr 08As Chico Felipe said, a whole blog post bitching about bitching. That’s like metabitching. If Twitter’s the perfect format for bitching, you just used the wrong format, by your own logic.
Anyway, Twitter’s also the perfect format for randomly praising stuff. Grep a Twitter feed for “ftw” and “fail,” you’ll probably find equal numbers of each.
Adam Schilling
on 16 Apr 08I’m pretty sure I’ve contributed to this, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say IE6 is possibly the most bitched about product on Twitter (at least in the circles I follow). ;-)
Chris Jones
on 16 Apr 08I think you touched on how twitter can be great and that’s by spending a bit of time and cutting through the BS and getting to the stuff that matters to you. It’s so easy to get sucked into the negativity that seems to follow every service like this around but the controls exist in twitter itself to make the experience as awesome as you want it to be, not to mention all the cool stuff people are doing with it (air apps, web apps, etc)
Oliver Sweatman
on 16 Apr 08John Winokur, the author of “The Big Book of Irony’, (referring to bitching blogs, not Twitter, but I think it’s still applicable) calls lazy negativity, or bitching, the “scorched-earth attack of snarkiness”. He says “snarkiness is contempt before investigation… just a pose that rejects everything in its path… ” (NY Times). In other words, more noise…
john
on 16 Apr 08I think Twitter is the essence of needless noise. In a perfect world, people would use it’s limitation in a beautiful way much the way haiku is limited, and profound. Unfortunately, most people aren’t that elegent.
Sunir Shah
on 16 Apr 08How could any web application company hate Twitter? When your customers are everywhere in the world, it’s hard work to keep it touch with who they are or how they perceive you. We’ve been loving Twitter at FreshBooks as a way to stay close to our customers throughout the day, get to know them, and help them whenever necessary.
It seems like http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=basecamp&u= is an excellent source of information about who your customers are, how they use Basecamp, and how much they in fact love it.
It’s not lemons. It’s lemonade.
Eric Rice
on 16 Apr 08Of course, there are those of us that view that 140 character limit as a sentence limit, not a thought one. Sometimes, it just takes 58 tweets to make a point.
Rules be damned, and life begins!
Berserk
on 16 Apr 08So, someone said something bad about the MBAir?
[thisisasmiley]
Farhan Lalji
on 16 Apr 08Can complementing be considered the inverse of bitching? If so then I think Twitter is good for that too. I sent a tweet about BA and Terminal 5 in Heathrow earlier today because the experience was so pleasant, completely opposite of what the media’s been saying about it.
AnonAnonAnon
on 16 Apr 08A term I like for this is “white whine”, (if you can bear the mild racial implication.)
The subtext being that most of what gets bitched about is really excessively trivial in the grand scheme of things - so much that taking the time to publish one’s complaint to the world seems (from a distance) to be excruciatingly narcissistic, doubly so when done from the privileged seat behind a $2000 computer or from a $400 phone. Within the world of Twitter, though, it just seems natural-like something you’d kvetch about to people in the room—not because it’s important, but because it’s novel and immediate, and can strike conversation. Indeed, IRC chatrooms have tended to be the same way, as far as I can tell. Perhaps you’ve found Campfire to serve that purpose as well?
I would add to the general notion that negative comment provides a “rush” that comment threads on weblogs often have the same issue. Surely 37signals has noticed that a significant amount of comment activity on SvN is negatively poised. Indeed, it seems to me that most comments here are smugly negative and contradictory, sometimes downright nasty—which is striking when you consider that they evidently come from regular readers. It seems that the ability to express negativity in brief form without much thought is a honeypot for attention-starved RSS-fiends.
Matt Radel
on 16 Apr 08Doing the occasional bitch tweet can blow off a bit of steam, which is nice. But if the vast majority of your tweets are some form of a rant you might need to seek help.
Mike
on 16 Apr 08Wow, David. In general I have the highest respect for you, but this post reads like you just had to post something, so you decided to bitch yourself. Too bad you didn’t make it more succinct. At first, you seem to be implying that most Twitter traffic is bitching, but after careful reading, you appear to only be saying:
“Bitching is such a succinct form of expression…. This makes bitching a perfect fit for the 140 characters of Twitter.”
Which would appear to be a comment on the suitability of bitching as fodder for Twittering, versus the amount of Twitter traffic that actually is bitching. I hope that is what you are trying to say, because if you meant to say that most Twitter traffic is bitching, one wonders how you would be in any position to have an informed opinion, since, as far as I know, you a) don’t use Twitter, and b) most Twitter traffic is from Asia in languages you don’t understand.
Hell, I don’t even agree with you that bitching is a succinct form of expression. Walk around any city street, listen in on any phone all or meeting, and what will you hear? Endless bitching. Bitching about jobs, about politics, about the economy, about every topic under the sun. If I had to pick one word to describe bitching “succinct” would not be that word.
Sam
on 16 Apr 08I agree with your statement to a point but I still feel like Twitter is also useful for forming a community around your interests or common goals even if that includes complaining.
For example we have built a following of parents interested in the development of our web app – Abby’s Booth.
Join us: http://twitter.com/abbysbooth
Doug
on 16 Apr 08For some reason human nature makes it easier to be negative than positive. We will quickly point out how something could be better, but rarely complement someone for excellence. We have to come up with awards to do the latter, the former happens without even asking.
AnchovyDave
on 16 Apr 08@mike
maybe you need to read the definition of “succinct”.
Mark Evans
on 16 Apr 08It’s true that Twitter can be used to bitch but if you’re not into listening to all that noise, the beauty of Twitter is you can turn it off. Personally, I’m into following people offering insight, ideas, interesting articles, book, Web sites, etc. If someone starts to use Twitter as a vehicle to bitch, I simply unfollow them.
ac
on 16 Apr 08Uh, been using twittter for a long time now. Not seeing a whole lot of bitching. Maybe find some new friends?
Mike
on 16 Apr 08@AnchovyDave
I know the definition, and counter with “ambiguous”.
James Higginbotham
on 16 Apr 08I’ve experienced rants or moments of true excitement about things both personal and professional on Twitter. Being selective of those I follow helps greatly.
Erik Mallinson
on 18 Apr 08I only follow my real life friends and have my profile set to private. There’s still bitching but it’s my friends… so I care. Hopefully they do the same.
Aronado
on 18 Apr 08Great post. Seems like “bitching” usually gets people excited. I see twitter as more of a market resaerch tool that brings information to your desktop. To me, it is truly amazing bitching, discovering, listening, expressing, thinking, evaluating, creating etc. it all happens.
Now, there is a new Social Network out that was created for people to bitch about things they are discontent with and then the community pitches ideas to make things better. Yes, I am part of the company but, I beleive it is very relevent to this discussion. http://bitchybetty.Org.
welcome any comments to: [email protected]
This discussion is closed.