Easily the Most Idiotic Thing I’ve Read All Day ⇥ techcrunch.com

Josh Constine, for that vile place that is TechCrunch:

Tweets past, present, and future now show their exact number of retweets and favorites instead of showing “50+” if they pass that count — a move that could promote vanity and competition on Twitter.

Vanity? On Twitter?

However, the exact counts could make people feel like they have no influence when they see they’ve received two retweets while someone else got twenty thousand.

If you received two retweets before today, your count would also show “2”, because this change only applies to fifty retweets/favourites and greater. If you’re comparing yourself to someone with 20,000 retweets, you’re off to a bad start because that person is probably Justin Bieber.

But now it’s more important than ever to remember it’s the quality and thoughtfulness of what you tweet, not the RTs and FAVs that really matter.

How about the quality and thoughtfulness of what you write, Mr. Constine?

Constine seems to have a recurring beef with vanity on the internet. Earlier this week, he wrote a piece about the ability to tweet and update a Facebook status from Notification Centre:

Why read about someone else when you could write about yourself? Soon the “Tap to post” to Facebook and Twitter buttons announced at WWDC today will appear in iOS and OS X Mountain Lion’s Notifications centers so you’ll always be just a swipe away from sharing. But that means you won’t have to visit Facebook or Twitter where you collide with what others create, diminishing the ambient intimacy they offer and turning them into ego-driven broadcast channels.

Josh Constine is reminiscing about a Twitter that never existed (one of “ambient intimacy”). Has he forgotten that the original Twitter prompt was “what are you doing?”