Tech nerds and Twitter
Ben Brooks on his decision to leave Twitter:
I’ve stopped posting new updates. I’m only checking it a couple times a day. And if Twitter doesn’t do an about face I’ll be done with it very quickly. I’m giving them one last chance, but also slowing my usage to a crawl — imagine the power of the entire nerd community doing this. The easiest way to making Twitter take notice, is to remove your eyeballs from their advertising, and devalue the network by reducing the size of it.
First, nerds are running third-party clients that do not show promoted tweets or ads. Second, the number of people retweeting every single Justin Bieber’s tweet is vastly more than the number of people discussing the latest API restrictions. Third, removing these eyeballs is actually improving Twitter’s bottom line, as it is reducing the strain on backends and does not hurt the current business model any single bit.