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I love Twitter and I hate twitter.  I love it because it makes it easy to connect with anyone in the world and I hate it because it makes it easy to connect with anyone in the world including those you don't want to.  I love it because it's easy to find people who share your interests by looking for tweets related to those interests, and I hate it because it makes it easy for people who don't share those interests to target you precisely because of those interests.   I love it because of the exchange of ideas, and the debate and the connection you form with people when discussing things in an open forum, and I hate it because it makes it easy for people who don't share those ideas, or don't want to form any connection to attack you because of those ideas.

Twitter is a platform that has benefits that are a double-edged sword.  When you are in college or high school and you are introduced to the concept of debate, you are usually placed into opposing teams and given a topic to debate.  Each team is usually assigned a side of the debate they must take and they have to find arguments to support their side.  This often results in you being placed on a team where you need to argue for something that you would never in a million years actually argue for in your personal life.  I'm not mentioning specific issues here for a reason, I don't want this post to become specific to one issue.

The point here is that both teams engage in a debate around an issue putting forward their own pros, and discounting the pros of the opposing team with cons that negate their arguments.  With most debates the side that eventually wins is not usually the side that is "right" but rather the side that made the most persuasive argument, spoke with the greatest clarity, and in essence, conducted themselves in a manner that makes them appealing as a person - the actual substance of their argument is almost irrelevant.  Therein lies the problem with the concept of a debate, it isn't to find an answer to a question, a yes or a no, a right or a wrong, it is to explore arguments and the issue being debated.  The trouble with places like twitter, and the internet in general, is that most people don't treat it in this way, most people are convinced they have to "win" and that they have to make the other person "lose" and that leads to some very ugly situations.

In the past I engaged in debates online about issues, never trying to actually convince someone to think one way or another but simply exploring issues and presenting arguments people had not considered.  That didn't end well.  I have been a member of various online forums over the years and in my time one thing always remained true for every single platform I ever used - the bigger it got the less use it became.  Smaller communities work because they are niche, only those who join actually have an interest in the focus of the community, and the issues they discuss are usually discussed in a civil way at first.  As those communities grow and gain success, prominence, and most importantly visibility, they attract others to join who don't have any interest in the original motivation for founding the community.  This leads to the decline of debate and the incline of straight out arguing.  Such conflict inevitably causes divisions, and cliques form around positions at opposing sides of those divisions.  The community becomes a collection of smaller communities and with each new division and separation those communities divide until individuals no longer feel part of the overall community which arguably no longer exists.

The final consequence is that those individuals abandon the community altogether.  Over time each smaller community succumbs to the same pressure as they are pushed out and inevitably you end up with a few large warring factions that dominate.  The desirability dies and the online community that once existed disappears entirely.  At that point you then have the original creator who will make one of two choices, either to close the site altogether, or to step back and allow it to descend into anarchy and find a way to profit from it.  You can guess which option the creator of Twitter took.

Having seen this happen time and again I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth the energy to even bother responding to some tweets on twitter.  In particular those that ask questions and raise issues that the tweet wants to debate, because ultimately there are now too few people on twitter that actually want to debate any issue they tweet about, they just want someone to have an argument with.  By extension there are also those who seek out arguments as a means of increasing their exposure on twitter with the active aim of gathering followers who side with them and blocking any of those who dissent along the way.  These people can be seen as militant tweeters and they are usually quite easy to spot, you only need to spend a minute or so scrolling through their timeline to see that is the case.

One last comment I would like to add is that there are many people like me who still use twitter as a means to stay in touch with a handful of people but are completely disillusioned with the platform.  For me and those like me you will often wonder why we do not comment on certain things that are tweeted, the reality is not that we do not care, but usually that we have so much to say about them and know twitter isn't the place so we don't bother engaging at all.  Silence on twitter does not mean the person behind the account isn't there, doesn't see those tweets, and is ignoring you, the opposite is usually the case, they see, they understand, they think, and rethink, and over think, and don't comment.