Behavioural Spam ⇥ garbageday.email

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day:

Twitter is still a primarily text-based app, which means that syntactical memes can spread across the platform. A good example would be the “me: / nobody:” tweet format. A recent syntactical meme has completely overwhelmed Twitter, though. It starts with the phrase “we’re cancelling each other over…” and then you’re meant to post a “cancellable” take about some niche subject. I’ve seen tweets calling for cancellable takes about everything from Boston’s public transport to ghosts.

This sort of thing has always existed, but it has historically occupied a specific section of a BBS or forum. You could ignore it. In the blended world of a typical Twitter timeline, it seems unavoidable. It would be cool if we could universally minimize these kinds of patterns. But seeing as Twitter still thinks trending topics are a good idea I doubt we will get any controls to reduce popular post formats.