I dared to comment on an online forum that I found it sad that a social networking forum like Twitter seemed to be part of a world that promotes money and business over all else. Shock and horror. How dare I say that? It wasn't true, Twitter was wonderful etc. Well, sorry, but my brief experience tells me so.
I've been learning how to 'use' Twitter for the past 18 days. From day two I had two or more suggestions to follow with a sickly pink button beside them saying Promoted. All of these promoted things turned out to be businesses selling clothes and stuff I do not want.
I followed a suggestion to use the hash key and join the Friday reads book group. My first tweet to them was about the remarkable, well written, and thoroughly thought provoking, Inspector Shan series by Eliot Pattison, set in Tibet. I then received a tweet from a travel company which makes tours to Tibet. Tweet is the wrong word it was just a business message.
Since I have complained to Twitter support all the suggestions to follow businesses with Promoted buttons beside them have vanished. I've discovered how to block any businesses which bother me. However now I am receiving tweets from people I am not following, nor are they following me. It's difficult enough reading and understanding the Tweets from the people I follow as it is without tweets from some twit raving about baseball which I hate.
I am picky, I only follow writers I know or want to know, a few small press publishers I know and like their books, and reader/book groups like the Guardian one.
So how does Twitter dare post on my Twitter site so much promoted business when I am clearly not interested in anything other than writing, reading, and publishing? All it does is convince me that Twitter is only after making money from compiling information about the people using the system and flogging it off to business interests.
