Nice example of projection from Dave Winer on Twitter:
Twitter is a big deal now. Calacanis used to be #1, now he’s a nobody. For a guy like him the difference is huge. And the resentment real.
Winer keeps going on and on and on about Twitter’s suggested users list, which gave some celebs and tech A-listers many hundreds of thousands of followers compared to his 20,000. But as he bitches and moans about how follower counts like his used to make you a big deal, he completely ignores the fact that most of the people who read him on Twitter have followers in the hundreds or lower. He was perfectly happy with the inequalities of the system while he was on top. Now he’s Che Fucking Guevara.
Show of hands: Does anyone else other than Winer give a shit about the suggested users list or Twitter follow counts? Thanks to Twitter, we have learned that a 50-something obscure software developer wakes up every single day and gets his Depends in a bunch because Ashton Kutcher and Oprah and P. Diddy have more followers than he does. It’s a sad but hilarious spectacle to watch him go ape over any system that quantifies popularity and puts him at the top — as long as he stays there — and go all jilted lover when he falls off it.
Earth to Dave: You are not famous. You are Internet famous, which only means anything when something is new. When the rest of the world shows up, as they have on Twitter, the genuinely famous show up and that’s the end of your celebrity. On Twitter now your Internet fame is worthless. Ashton Kutcher craps out bigger celebrities than you each morning.
Tags: dave winer, fame, jason calacanis, Twitter
Dave, bless him, would like a way to delete replies to Twitters – presumably other people’s replies to his.
http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1947496731
Ah, it gets better. Check out Jason’s reply:
@davewiner I have no resentment & I’m good friends w/Twitter folks.My 16k email subs & 10k This Week in Startups viewers r more important
http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis/status/1939321799
And another jab:
@davewiner Actually, I was never higher than #2 on Twitter. It was always a joke for me–including offering $250k for the “suggested list”
http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis/status/1939303783
I have a major disagreement with Dave Winer about his preoccupation with the Suggested User List. Dave is convinced that being on the Suggested User List is a conflict of interest for publishers based on the following chain of assumptions:
All of which makes for an admittedly weak argument that a conflict of interest occured, but that hasn’t stopped Dave from making this case. This attack on Mashable illustrates the typical style, a chain of hypothetical smears that essentially boil down to a loaded question like “Are you still beating your wife?” For a while, he limited his accusations to technical bloggers (a common foil for him), but I lost my patience when he accused the New York Times of being in the bag for twitter (full disclosure: I work on twitter for the NYT) because the Personal Tech column ran a how-to on twitter tools:
I mean, WHY ELSE would a column about personal technology cover twitter except for media collusion? A conflict of interest is a serious charge, but one that does not seem to be made here on any particular merit.
“Does anyone else other than Winer give a shit about the suggested users list or Twitter follow counts?”
No, because no one is quite as narcissistic as dave winer. It absolutely kills him not to be on the sul. It kills him that no one listens to him. And it kills him that no one uses anything he develops.
As always, it’s the same old story. winer wants to delete other people’s messages that are critical of him. And winer is pissed off about a Suggested User List, only because he’s not at the top of the list.
And it continues. Another day of Twitter obsession from dave-crazy-whackorino
More more obsession.
The anti-Twitter diatribes continue using the same old techniques. Let’s see, we have a podcast series with Jay Rosen to prop up Dave’s media and journalism discussions.
Then there’s the who follows who pages to try to uncover the secret elite inner circle or something like that. As an aside, I’m “on Twitter” and I have subscribed to a set of people. But I never actually open up Twitter apps or the Twitter web site. So the tweeting may be happening, but I’m not listening.
Now we have the railing against Twitter as Fragile So It Cannot Be Trusted Because It is Going To Go Away. Let’s see, is it as Fragile as weblogs.com? Is it as Simple as that OPML Editor Flickr Fans application (two points: a whacked out application to edit text and a whacked out application that normally edits text being used to download images from Flickr). Many straw men propped up in this one: we have people who lost their money in Katrina because the ATMs ran out of money? Who lost money then? We have the Twitter won’t tell me how it works so it must not be simple and therefore cannot be trusted.
So which is it? Is Twitter a vital global utility too important to fail? Or is it a passing toy of the celebrities.
The Jealousy is Delicious. The Envy is Sublime.