Holaaaaaaaaaaaaa y’all! You know I love Twitter. I love it a lot more than Facebook. Okay, I love most things more than Facebook. Twitter is fun and entertaining and full of really hot chicks that are desperate to be internet famous in the form of Favstar favorites and retweets. Being really hot means they can post pics of themselves in bikinis or short shorts or showing some sexy cleavage and they’ll rack (see what I did there?) up the followers and guys will “favorite” their tweets in hopes of getting to have sex with them. Such teases!
This disturbs me so much that I can’t help but take part in it. Wait, that’s not true. My retweets are legit and my only motivation is friendship and possibly marriage. Never anything illicit or dirty! That’s not my style at all.
Like all social media sites, Twitter has its share of drama and battles. People get into tiffs over politics, sports, pop culture and all the usual stuff. The biggest battle raging on Twitter however is over retweets. There is a large and very vocal group of people who always have their panties in a wad over MANUAL retweets and they will always be angry about it.
What’s a “manual” retweet you ask? Well, if you are using a Twitter app like TweetDeck or whatever, when you hit the retweet button you are given the option of just retweeting the tweet or editing the tweet by adding something to it. Why does it upset so many people to be “manually” retweeted? Well, you see when some brilliant and hilarious Favstar person tweets a brilliant and hilarious tweet, if you “manually” retweet it, when one of YOUR followers who doesn’t happen to follow the brilliant and hilarious tweet “favorites” that tweet YOU …. *sniff, sniff* …. ALSO GET A STAR AND IT’S NOT FAIR BECAUSE YOU DON’T DESERVE THAT STAR!!!! THE ORIGINAL BRILLIANT AND HILARIOUS TWEETER IS THE ONLY ONE WHO DESERVES THE STARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! WHAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!! YOU’RE STEALING STARS AND UNFAIRLY SHARING MY SPOTLIGHT!
I was rather rudely introduced to this scourge of manual retweets one day when I manually retweeted a pretty funny person’s tweet and added “LOL!” to it. The person immediately sent me a direct message telling me not to do that. I informed them that I will never, ever do anything to let them know I find them funny or give them any positive reinforcement again as long as I live. Okay, so maybe I was being a little dramatic, but the silliness of the whole thing just pissed me off.
Now, I will agree that hitting the “edit” button and retweeting without adding anything else in an attempt to appropriate someone else’s tweet (or stars) is a pretty crappy thing to do. Stealing tweets is a big problem and a really crappy thing to do. I agree that stealing tweets is a form of stealing someone’s intellectual property and don’t support that at all. There is also a HUGE problem with sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post taking screen grabs of people’s tweets and using them as content to drive traffic. That’s some bullshit right there. But for journalists who whine about people editing their tweets that link to a story they’ve done, as long as the link is still there and you can still get the traffic, don’t bitch about it.
Most people aren’t thinking about stars or Favstar trophies or any of those silly little things though. Most of them are on Twitter to crack a few jokes, mock famous people and politicians, enjoy big sporting events and stuff like that together. Most people aren’t narcissistic freaks desperate for attention and validation through meaningless stars and trophies from some website.
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