The End Of Twitter? Are Spammers Taking Over?

All good things… or bad things for that matter must come to an end, right? From great trends such as repurposing garden gnomes, to bad ones such as cuddling pet rocks, there comes a moment in which everything becomes obsolete. Is this what is happening to Twitter?

Lately the people who are contacting me on Twitter are not real. They are bots, spammers… entities obsessed in selling me sex or cheap ringtones. Similar to what happened to MySpace just after it peaked it is becoming infected with noise as opposed to real information.

Something I enjoy doing is seeing what topics are peaking, and reading what people say about them. Tonight, most topics led to dead-end type of results. Most tweets such as “Free ringtones #ATT” or “sexy webcams #ATT,” or other wasteful crap was filling the “ecosphere”… and this repeated all throughout the most trendy topics. It seems the dialogue is being killed by all the fake accounts that are born. I wonder what the ratio is now between real users and fake ones at the moment.

Will there be a time when there are more spammers than real people behind the Twitter accounts? Very likely. But let’s go slightly deeper and wonder… why is this? I know I’m always repeating the same thing, but this is just the plain old manifestation of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of Commons. No good system can ever peak in popularity that doesn’t start sucking because there will always be people abusing that system. When you are unable to filter your community successfully, or isolate it for that matter, these things are bound to happen.

I suggest the Twitter executives to monetize on the community immediately, because it is only a matter of time until a good chunk of the people abandon Twitter, and say hello to Tumblr. Ah, the era of short intensities… keeps getting… shorter.

-Alex