Dear Twitter, forget the numbers, focus on the people

I know it has been a busy time for you (indeed, when is it not, with millions of tweets flying around the world), but I really think it is time you and I had a little chat.

I joined your service seven years ago (January 12, 2009) and to be honest, I did not quite know what to do there – my first tweet was “Just sitting around, doing some writing.” After all, there did not seem to be quite any guide for what you did on Twitter – you had 140 characters to do just about anything. It was not as focused as LinkedIn, “the place you found a job,” or Facebook, the “food-wedding-pics-and-FarmVille” place. No, at Twitter, you either simply sat in front of a text box and wondered what to put into it, or read brief messages put up by the people you followed. It was not as colorful as Facebook or as professional useful as LinkedIn. And yet, within a year, I was hooked.

The reason for my near-addiction to Twitter was the very lack of a core focus that had confused me initially. You could do just about anything on it – from writing about your auto ride to dryly commenting about pushy people in a queue to answering queries about your field of work (I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked the “which phone should I buy” question). And this made it delightfully unpredictable – you pretty much knew what you would get when you opened Facebook or LinkedIn, but Twitter? Ah, you never quite knew what 140 characters would hit you.

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Its ease of use and speed (one of the reasons I used it more than Facebook was the fact that the app actually worked fine even on an EDGE connection) and sheer accessibility – opening a Twitter account was easy – actually made you a very good medium of communication. News often arrived on it well before it reached more conventional media because it was simply easier to type in 140 characters than prepare a more elaborate report. It was a boon in emergencies – people responded to requests for blood donations and for other information in calamities like earthquakes and accidents. In many places, local administration and companies took to Twitter to serve people better.

Twitter’s succinct and speedy nature also made it a terrific barometer of public sentiment. Suddenly, a lot of us were heading to your service or app to find out about a film instead of waiting for a detailed review from an expert later on. It became second nature to many of us to watch a football or cricket math on television with Twitter open on our phones, simply to find out what people were saying about what we were seeing – and of course, adding our tuppence to it.

And it is this “barometer of public sentiment” role which I suspect has messed you up. For, at some stage, a lot of people figured out that it was possible to manipulate content on Twitter – to rabidly praise or abuse something or some people to the extent that they would appear to be either awesome or awful to the relatively unknowing reader. And as criticism comes easier to human nature than does praise, the tribe of Twitter trolls – whose very existence seems to revolve around insulting and even abusing people and who were often available on hire – was born.

And it has certainly taken over a significant part of Twitter. Rare is the day which does not pass without someone or the other calling Twitter a poison-spewing network or a cesspit of sorts (they might use other words, but there is no doubting their meaning). Now, when one logs in to Twitter, one not only looks forward to getting the latest news and opinions from those one follows, but also braces oneself for the inevitable torrent of abuse that seems to have taken up residence on the network. It is one thing to have an opinion. Quite another to have one which verbally assaults other people. And assaulting people verbally seems to come far too easily to many of Twitter’s denizens – we have seen writers abused, journalists threatened with rape and death threats issued to supporters of different causes or political parties. Indeed, it has become so common now that it hardly surprises people any more – “ignore him/her, they are just trolling” has become a survival philosophy for many of us out here.

It needs to be remembered that it is the people on it who make Twitter what it is – a powerful social network. As long as sincerity and civility prevailed, it was a joyous, if occasionally eccentric place to be in. That, alas, is no longer the case. It is hardly surprising that a number of people have stepped away from Twitter – noted actor Stephen Fry was the latest to deactivate his Twitter account, explaining his reasons for doing so in an entry rather aptly titled “Too many people have pissed in the pool.”

And more people will leave, if dear Twitter, you do not get your house in order soon. Which makes me wonder: how difficult can it be to kick someone who is being verbally abusive off a network? Does it need extensive investigation to figure out if a person is being offensive to others? Does it need a special sort of spell check to identify a swear word? Do you need rocket science to spot someone supporting or advocating terrorism? You have so many algorithms to spot user habits and behaviour. Don’t tell me you cannot do any of what I just mentioned.

I have read that you are considering making changes to your timeline, making tweets longer and also other changes to your service to attract more users. Honestly, I think you are barking up the wrong tree. There is nothing wrong with Twitter as a service the way it is today. What is wrong is the kind of people who are being given a free run. Even a library has rules and regulations, most notably the huge board of “Silence”, violating which leads to one being asked to leave. Surely it is time Twitter did something similar? Your survival as a social network does not depend on getting more new users, but getting rid of the rotten apples that are driving people away or worse making existing users more cynical than ever.

Forget the numbers, dear Twitter. Focus on the people. And be social once again.