I’m a tweeter. I tweet. I love tweeting and reading your tweets. You know how when you’re watching some dumb show on TV and you see the hashtag up there on the screen and you think, “What kind of loser needs a hashtag to watch a show?” I do.
The problem with twitter is that it’s open enrollment. Anybody is allowed to tweet. It’s not like Facebook, where only verified real people can create an account and then Mark Zuckerberg decides what updates are “quality” and what updates by perfectly nice lady humor writers are garbage that must be filtered out by his *&^% algorithm—but I digress.
Actually, as long as I’ve digressed: Part of the fun of twitter is all the fakers. There’s a fake account in my school district tweeting official-looking announcements that school is canceled, instantly retweeted by hopeful and unsuspecting kids. I love this. (Third level of digression: I may be a terrible person.)
Back to the problem: I love twitter but I hate a lot of people—or rather, I hate their tweets. Considering that I can’t possibly see what every delightful twitterer has to say, why would I waste time on annoying tweeters? I wouldn’t. Over the years, I have developed a little set of rules to sort out the tweet from the twaff and I’m here to share them with you. It’s a public service, really. I simply do not follow anyone who:
- Tweets only links, sweepstakes, fitness updates, recipes, inspirational quotes, or horoscopes
- Tweets about “furbabies” (Bless you, dears, but you are not my people.)
- Tweets exclusively to celebrities or exclusively about boy bands (Sadly, this includes many grown women.)
- Has Favstar in her bio (Seriously, Favstar people, calm down with the retweets.)
- Is on #TEAMFOLLOWBACK (These people need to calm down in general.)
- Has a bio promoting a terrible self-published fantasy novel or earnest poetry
- Seems to be working out something on twitter that would be better addressed by a licensed therapist (I wish you the best, but I cannot stay up all night worrying about your problems. Plus, I think you might be making up the whole thing.)
- Tweets a bunch of nonsense (%^&* robot spammers)
- Uses an avatar photo of some body part other than the face
- Just isn’t my cup of tea
Twitter is supposed to be fun, y’all. If you’re not having fun, I highly recommend that you use that unfollow button early and often—except on my account. That really hurts my feelings.