Summarizing: What YOU Felt About The Recent Ashton/ Oprah/ CNN Hype
* Thanks all for the 200 incredibly thoughtful/funny/candid responses. You folks never fail to surprise us (in an excellent way. Hope everyone enjoys this wide range of comments that only MrTweet readers (i.e. YOU) can come out with!
We asked the question last Sunday – “What did YOU feel about the Ashton/Oprah/CNN hype?”. Responses flooded in – we received 107 in the first hour alone, and almost 200 in total. We carefully read through all of them to understand how our readers (which represented a very broad cross-section of the Twitter user base) felt about the intense coverage that was happening both in the media and within Twitter.
Ego Stroking Contest
While the responses spanned across negative to positive, the predominant sentiment seems to be that it was one big ego-stroking contest. Debra called it a “race for number of followers“. Susannah went one step further, commenting that they felt that the common Twitterers were degraded, and treated as “all little knick knacks being set up on a tacky, mirrored shelf in some celebs bathroom“. Gail takes the cake for extreme creativity in this category, calling the celebs “self absorbed bloated ticks living off their brain dead fans“. Furthermore, as Gráinne (and others) noted, they “never said anything huge interesting anyway“.
Awareness for Important Issues
It was certainly not all negative though, with quite a few readers mentioning the positive impact of this intense media coverage shed light on issues they did not know about. Hopeful shared that she “learned about so many new things, including the Malaria No More Cause from Ashton and Demi” and Morgen learned about “modern day slavery” from Demi as well.
Why should Charity be Conditional?
But even the charitable aspects of this did not escape the skeptical gaze of several commenters. LadyHawke called it “Total self absorption disguised in altruism“, while Kaa wondered out loud on why it has to be conditional if they really cared about charity, and Samantha is irritated that celebs tend to broadcast their “good deeds” all over the place.
Ashton Killed The Whale
Another group of comments centered around what these intense mainstream coverage would do to Twitter. Again, it was predominantly negative, with users complaining about the strain it was placing on the Twitter servers. Dee noted that there has been nothing but problems since this past Friday from the mikey worm, copycats to fail whales, delays in tweets and lost tweets. LuckyMizM had a sharp observation – Ashton said during his campaign that he thought someone was hacking his account because his tweets weren’t showing up. Turns out that the reason was because Twitter was overcapacity (probably with folks trying to help him win)
Massive Influx of New Peeps
Other users also feared that this coverage damaged the core service by bringing in lots of people who do not understand Twitter. Dani felt that it “just created an influx of idiots on Twitter and TONS of spammers“, while Lakerin also observed that he had lots of “new commercial followers that are clumsily hawking their wares“. On a more personal level, Darren worried that Twitter was being overtaken by the mainstream, and hence becoming unpopular to early adopter geek types like himself.
Ending On A Nice Note…
Lots of negativity no doubt, but we at MrTweet (being the nice friendly people we are) wants to end this note by highlighting a few more lighthearted and positive comments. Lori notes that celebrities are just having fun like the rest of us, and they should not be condemned because of that. Our final highlight comes from Aaron, who seem delighted that Twitter is getting all this press because his circle of contacts is finally getting round to using Twitter!
All right, it took us a while to read through and digest 200 comments, and we hope you enjoyed this summary of what people like YOU felt over this incident. Sorry to those we did not manage to highlight – but keep the comments rolling in!
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