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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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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