Social Media Annoyances

I love twitter! Turns out that I was born to tweet and it's my favorite form of social media.

A couple of things that turn me off there. Do not Direct Message (DM) me the moment we've Followed each other, to try to sell me your book/music/services and/or to ask me to Like you on FB or anywhere else. I will unFollow you. Don't DM me to suggest I click on a link...

I don't auto Follow either. I look at the tweets of someone who has Followed me (all these capital "F"'s are exhausting!) and if all they do is (a) effusively thank new followers or (b) tweet their own book (BUY MY BOOK) or (c) tweet only their own deathless prose - sayings, lines from their book, what have you without ever engaging with other people, much less retweeting other people or (d) spammy/obscene material or (e) all their tweets are in a language I can't read - and I do have  followers that I follow whose primary language doesn't happen to be English but because they got a better education than I did, they kindly do tweet in English sometimes.....where was I going with this? Oh, ok in all those cases, I won't follow them.

The other thing that is a social media no-no to ME? The way the social media tools themselves make arbitrary changes we the users did NOT ask for, don't want and can't turn off. Especially if said changes are in the name of monetizing the cool social media tool and making a bunch of investors happy.

It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time. Alexis Ohanian