I almost never use twitter. And apparently twitter has noticed this, because this morning I received this message in an email:
This is confusing for many reasons.
- Since when is Twitter’s theme color orange?
- I made a twitter account under the username @TheGreaterBelow?
- Apparently, all I used the account for was to retweet subpar memes and stuff about Nine Inch Nails?
- Also, it looks like–for some reason–I used my real name? What??
- If I can barely even remember making this account, it has to be at least kind of old, so why am I only getting an email about it now?
- I understand the social media strategy of luring in users by proclaiming that they have “notifications” (the true meaning of which is a topic for another time). If I looked at my tumblr account and it said “Look! You have 20 notifications!”, that would be one thing. But to send me an email just to tell me I have one notification? As well as calling it the one notification–as if to make absolutely sure that I know there’s only one. That’s just bad marketing; no one wants to use an app that goes out of its way to tell you you’re not very popular.
So why did twitter do this?
My only guess is that the email was sent to all users who had been inactive for a certain amount of time, its creators making the assumption that, since the users been inactive, they’d probably have lots of notifications to look through. If that’s the case, I think that in most instances, the email was probably successful; it would read to users as “look at all the cool stuff you missed! Come check it out!” However, when I received this email someone who generally Does Not Use Twitter, it was saying something more along the lines of “literally one thing happened while you were gone. That’s it.”
If my theory is correct, all I can think to take away from this is that apparently my lack of online social connection is beyond the comprehension of both man and machine. Sorry?