Why I Stopped Using Twitter
There's a lot of Twitter hype in the blogosphere today, and I've contributed plenty of my own Twitter hype in the past. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to offer some anti-hype, derived from my own experience using Twitter — an explanation of why I STOPPED using Twitter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Back in March 2007, web1979's RIP Twitter (2007-2007) read the service its last rites — an obituary that now looks badly timed. By December, the same-day syndicated takes frame Twitter as booming: Web Strategy argues conversations are shifting onto the platform, and Logic+Emotion credits its growth to being 'a conversation ecosystem.'
Publishing 2.0's anti-hype turn matters because of what the author concedes alongside it: Twitter has become his blog's top referrer, with over 2,000 referrals in the last 30 days, and he notes a visible influx of new users over the same period. Quitting a tool at the moment it becomes your largest traffic source — after contributing plenty of hype yourself — is the tension this piece sits on.
First-order effects
- The author walks away from a service that is currently his blog's number-one referral source, trading measurable traffic for whatever cost in time and attention drove the exit.
- His anti-hype argument lands directly against the same-day chorus (Web Strategy, Logic+Emotion) holding that conversation itself has migrated to Twitter.
Second-order effects
- Bloggers who built audiences on their own sites face the same forced choice: follow readers into the conversation ecosystem and fragment their presence, or stay put and risk becoming referrer-dependent on a tool they may not want to use.
- Twitter's observed surge of new users over the past 30 days means each high-profile defection like this one gets weighed against a visibly growing base, sharpening the hype-versus-fatigue debate rather than settling it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, publishing economics built on blog-to-blog referral traffic erode as attention consolidates into hosted conversation platforms — raising the structural question of who owns the audience when the discussion happens off-site.
- Early-adopter burnout coexisting with mainstream adoption suggests the service's fate will be decided not by its loudest first users but by whether the incoming wave finds the format worth the cost.
The trend: Microblogging's shift of conversation off independent blogs is forcing early-adopter publishers to choose between their own sites' traffic economics and the platforms where their audiences now gather.