It’s easy to think of things that would make Twitter better: Banning Nazis. Not showing us tweets from random people we don’t follow. Banning Donald Trump. Better filtering of fake news. An edit button. And did I mention banning the racists and nazis and Donald Trump? Well, the birdbrains aren’t fixing any of that. Oh no, their newest idea to make Twitter just that much more horrible is here instead: tweets you can hear!
Yes it’s true.
You can Tweet a Tweet. But now you can Tweet your voice!
Rolling out today on iOS, you can now record and Tweet with audio. pic.twitter.com/jezRmh1dkD
— Twitter (@Twitter) June 17, 2020
I wish I could record an audio tweet for you right now so you could hear the long sigh morphing into a scream that I let out when I read this news.
Let’s break down the many ways this is bad and stupid. First off, I think I’m not alone in saying that I would rather throw my phone out of the window than listen to anything on Twitter. I want to scroll my feed of toxicity and random nihilist humor in quiet, and I will never, ever pause to play a mystery sound! Unless it’s a video of a cute animal with the caption “sound on!” audio is not happening for me!
The internet is a text-based and visual medium. We don’t want audio here. We want pretty pictures and words we can read or skim over and not dully process at our own pace. That’s why there are few things more annoying in this world than autoplay ads, but this sounds worse. That’s why videos with captions are great. That’s why gifs are great. Because the one thing Twitter has going for it is SILENCE.
But what’s worse is the abuse this will allow for. Twitter can barely moderate text; I can’t imagine what it’s going to do with a sudden influx of uncaptioned, raw audio. Those of us familiar with Twitter harassment just can’t wait for randos in our mentions recording audio messages to call us bitches and worse! It’s going to be awesome!
This is a bad idea. Like, New Coke-level bad. It’s adding the one thing to Twitter than no one is asking for, that’s inconvenient to use and access and will be ripe for abuse and spreading hate. Not only that, but it’s a waste of energy and resources that Twitter should be using to … hm … GET RID OF THE RACISTS AND NAZIS ON THE PLATFORM!
Coming soon, Facebook posts you can smell, because WHY NOT?
(image: Pexels)
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