Chart of the Day: What We Hate About Twitter

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Megan Garber points us to a new study of what we like and dislike in tweets, and summarizes it this way:

The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable, in other words, would be overly long. It would contain stale information. It would #totally #overuse #hashtags. It would be excessively personal. It would be aggressively mundane. It would be whiny.

Overly long? Really? There are people who can’t quite make it to the end if you use up your full quota of 140 characters?

In any case, the full study is here, and I actually took something different away from it: most of us don’t really care that much. Take a look at the chart on the right and focus not on what we don’t like, but on what we do like. There’s surprisingly little difference. It ranges from about 47% for “Me Now” tweets down to 35% for “Presence Maintenance” tweets. That’s not really a big range.

So with the exception of Presence Maintenance, which I think we can all agree has gone the way of the dodo, there’s not much useful advice here. Go ahead and tweet whatever you want to.

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Russian bots are impersonating us. Trump and his allies want to silence us. AI wants to (and does!) steal our content. The list goes on. But with 50 years of experience, we know we were built for this moment: We’re ready to keep diving deep and uncovering the truth, then getting that to you right here, completely accessible and never behind a paywall.

While our work is free to read, watch, and listen to online, it’s incredibly costly to make. Court documents, travel, research: It all adds up. Because we’re a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on reader support to fund our investigations. Will you stand with us in these extraordinary times, as headlines clamour for our attention and disinformation is rampant? We can’t get the truth out without you.

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