Like Things I Terribly Miss in Twitter – E L S U A ~ A blog by Luis Suarez...
People have forgotten to build community in Twitter and, instead, they have decided they just want to build a followship ... Just pure ego-centric entertainment to showcase how important they / we all are
I remember the early days of Twitter when the public timeline was still a thing and anyone could jump into any conversation without it feeling weird or risk getting abuse for sticking their nose in.
We were all like-minded people looking to build a better online world and push the boundaries of what we could achieve in 140 characters. But the most important thing was that we wanted to do it together.
We were all new to it, all learning (or making it up) as we went along. Admittedly, it take long for a number of "super users" to appear but even they were happy to chat to anyone – that's how they became super users after all.
It's the problem with scale and a growing "maturity" of any platform. At the beginning it is fertile new ground, you explore, blaze trails, sow the seeds and try to establish a working base. Cooperation and discussion are high on the agenda. But as things expand the territory becomes more crowded, resources (attention and conversation) become increasingly scarce. Cooperation becomes competition, the nomadic willingness to explore becomes a land grab – people settle and try to claim social real estate as their own.
The only way to get that feeling back is to start again, dive into something new and exciting, but there has to be an upper limit else the same problems befall the explorers of this new frontier. Networks need to be small and self-sustaining or they will succumb to the perils of social capitalism.
