Twitter has been seen as confusing to normal users who no longer wish to use it and are drifting away. Recently, an article from The Guardian by Danny Yadron titled “Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?” described apparent confusion with the tweeting process.
Why do people not want to tweet?
There is a large number of people who create Twitter accounts but do not use them, and in the process, valuable handles that might useful to someone else are used up. The Guardian tried to figure out the problem these users faced, for which it conducted interviews with several “attempted and frustrated users.” Speaking to Yadron, Hazel Gould, a 39-year old British director, said she follows some feminist thought leaders on Twitter but is hesitant to engage with them.
“It reminded me of being at school with the cool girls,” she said.
Another struggler is 63-year old retiree Alphonso Pines, whose problem is that he is hashtagging when he should be “at-ing.” One of his ignored tweets was: “#Morningjoe why does how much money Hilary make upset you so much?”
Twitter aims to address the issue
Another example is that of a 63-year old Atlanta retiree who is quitting Twitter because he did not get a response to his tweets from the host of an MSNBC show.
Yadron explained, “A lot of people said they were spending too much time watching arguments between people they didn’t know and weren’t quite sure how to join in,” making an excellent point that getting strangers into arguments is the purpose of the social media network.
So the reason “normal people” find Twitter so very baffling is that they are not willing to get into disagreements with strangers. However, Twitter aims to make such quarrels or debates easy for all. During the recent earnings call, the micro-blogging firm said it intends to make serious efforts to fix the “broken windows and confusing parts” that hinder usage and make people go away.
Twitter does not detail how many people who signed up for the service have stopped using it regularly. It is expected that this number could run into the hundreds of millions. But the social media firm said it is seeing a resurgence in the accounts that lapsed. However, it is not clear whether those accounts were linked to “normal people” or not.
