I think in part it is to do with the conflict between the professional and private personas that people display online. My favourite Twitter friends are those who tweet about their lives, their feelings, their boyfriend troubles, their everyday traumas and amusements. But a large proportion of the people I follow are there partly or mainly for business, and can’t risk exposing themselves in that way. In fact, since I’ve started to meet other users at real life events, and some of those users have enquired as to what I do and requested my business card in order to put me in touch with potential clients, I’ve felt too constrained to really use Twitter to express myself, as I felt able to do a few months ago.

I’m not complaining. One of the things that I liked about Twitter in the beginning was that I ended up carrying many of my online conversations into meat space, partly because of my involvement in Twestival, but also because of other ad hoc arrangements, like the wonderful Edinburgh Social Media Coffee Morning, pub quizzes, tweet ups and dinners. I still think Twitter is a good way of meeting people. The enthusiasm for tweet ups hints at people’s desire to form real connections in an environment where they don’t feel constrained. All of the professional tweeters I’ve met have been a great deal more interesting in real life than they’ve allowed themselves to be online.

Another unpleasant new trend I’ve noticed recently is for users to form small cliques that endlessly ass kiss each other. One of Twitter’s early strengths was as a recommendation tool, but such recommendations only carry weight if they are done genuinely and sufficiently infrequently so as not to alienate other users. Follow Friday is a good example of this. At the beginning users were recommending quite interesting people to follow. Now they seem to be recommending people they feel they ought to. There is also a rather sickening trend towards false positivity. I think people feel unable to express a negative sentiment in case it reflects badly on them. As a result there are lot of people who project an image of being constantly on the verge of orgasmic bliss. I find these twitterers as irritating as I do those who constantly whinge.

To my mind, Twitter is echoing the trajectory of Blogger back in the early noughties (ironic given Evan Williams’ involvement in both). I had a Blogger blog back in 2002 and found it a good way to start conversations with people. There was a lot of random traffic, and people commented regularly on each other’s blogs. Today, even established bloggers note the dearth of traffic and commentary on their blogs. People still read blogs, but they’ve stopped commenting on them, and something similar is happening with Twitter. People are tweeting more but responding less, as Twitter becomes a platform for displaying your business credentials or personal agenda. This has had the twin effect of making me feel like I’m ‘showing off’ when I tweet, and that my followers are ‘spying’ on me, rather than engaging with what I say or telling me something real about themselves.

I’m not quite at the point of closing my account, but I think it’s safe to say my love affair with Twitter is over. I’ll watch its progress with interest, while keeping my eye out for smaller, newer, more interesting social media platforms.