Scott Karp: Talking to You People is a Massive Waste of Time
I was one of Scott Karp's friends on Twitter and I admit, I enjoyed our interactions there. Now I learn that to Scott, the conversations there were a massive waste of time. — He qualifies it, leaving some wiggle room:
Context & Ripple Effects
Scott Karp's exit from Twitter, laid out in his quitting post the day before, has now drawn a personal rebuttal from Anne Truitt Zelenka, who was among his Twitter friends and enjoyed the exchanges he now dismisses. Her post captures the awkwardness of the moment: a prominent publishing analyst declaring the very conversations that made the service sticky to be, with some qualification, "a massive waste of time" — while his own blog had logged over 2,000 Twitter referrals in the prior 30 days.
Karp is not quitting in a vacuum. Dave Winer's critique of Facebook in October had already primed the A-list blogging crowd to ask what these social tools are actually for, and the quit-and-write-about-it pattern was becoming its own genre of tech commentary.
First-order effects
- Karp loses a channel that was demonstrably driving readers to Publishing 2.0 — over 2,000 referrals in a month — trading measurable distribution for reclaimed attention.
- Zelenka and other Twitter friends of Karp are left responding on their own blogs rather than in the stream, fragmenting a conversation that previously lived in one place.
Second-order effects
- Other prominent early adopters face the same ledger — engagement time versus traffic returned — and each public departure or defense becomes content that amplifies the debate far beyond the service itself.
Third-order effects
- If influential users keep framing microblogging as an attention sink rather than a networking asset, pressure mounts on services like Twitter to prove utility — discovery, referral traffic, professional connection — beyond ambient chatter, a question the platform was already wrestling with via rumored ad units and third-party integrations like Twype.exe linking tweets to Skype status.
The trend: Late-2007 tech blogging is turning public departures from social tools into a recurring genre, forcing early platforms to justify conversational overhead with tangible returns.