Oh, hello. Welcome to Jeffrey’s Internet Etiquette Soapbox, where I passive-aggressively explain to you how obnoxious you are based on the trivial actions you take on a trivial social network!
- Retweeting when someone replies to you with a compliment
- The cardinal sin. There is no reason anyone would be at all interested in what some random person thinks of you. Your mom stopped caring when you turned five.
- Retweeting when someone includes you in a jumble of usernames with the “#ff” hashtag
- Congratulations! Someone thinks you’re worthy enough to be part of the cast of characters in their Final Fantasy fanfiction. Your followers already follow you. When they see that you’re included in a list of people to follow, they second-guess whether they should have followed you in the first place. Do you want that?
- Retweeting when someone replies to something that you say
- Unless what the person says is funny or interesting in its own right, there’s no need to retweet them for all your followers to see. Not even when they’re answering a question. We don’t want to be invited on a quest to discover the answer, since no one cares but you. If anyone did care, they’d check the replies to your question themselves.
- Putting pound signs before words, or concatenating words prefaced by a pound sign
- Pound signs serve no purpose; remove the key from your keyboard. I don’t care that it’s also the key for “3”.
- Telling people where you are
- No one has to know that you’ve left your basement. Take it to Google Latitude, where no one will hear about it. Have you ever bragged about patronizing McDonalds before the advent of Twitter? There’s no reason to start doing so now.
- Posting nothing but how relaxing of a day you’re having
- One can only surmise that you are only relaxed when you’re tweeting something pleasant, and at all other times you’re a nervous wreck.
In summary, if you ever stop to think about whether what you’re about to post has any relevance or use to anyone besides yourself, the answer is probably “no”, so put your phone away and pay attention to the tree you’re about to walk into.
Cosign, cosign, cosign.
Glad to see you posting, by the way.
Maybe its ’cause I’m a ‘creative’ (retch) but I can forgive RTing compliments a touch more than everything else on the list you’ve named. I see it as social proof that the stuff I (or anyone else for that matter) is good and it gets word out there, espicially when we’re just starting out/making a name for ourselves. It’s a necessary evil, I reckon. It’s more social proof than RTing a Follow Friday tweet, that’s for damn sure.
On a related tangent, I can’t stand celebrities/people of note who RT randoms in quotes and only adds a word or two. Or those who RT RT-request (I’M FUCKIN’ DRUNK CAN I GET AN RT??????). This is kind of a different discussion altogether though.
I agreed with everything up until the last couple points, primarily because I’m guilty of them. I like tweeting about where I am and what I’m doing… people in NYC actually seem to care.
Also thanks for letting me put a website in the comment field so I can create a backlink for my work company’s website.
– your sister
BLETIQUETTE!