10 Reasons Twitter Makes Me Nervous

When it’s not spoiling my TV shows, I love Twitter. Twitter is awesome. With one scroll through my timeline I can learn how late Lindsay is for her court date, where some rando chick ate breakfast and what Retta thought of last night’s Vampire Diaries.  It’s a one stop shop for everything I need in life. It’s a pretty magical place. Though, like all good things in this world, even Twitter has the ability to make me nervous. Here are a few reasons how….

1. Discovering Typos After Tweeting

Sometimes I get really excited about a tweet and post it hastily, without proofing all 140 characters thoroughly enough. Then, after a fav or two, I realize there’s a big fat embarrassing typo. Thus begins the battle between perfectionist and attention-whore. Do I delete and correct the tweet, losing favs? Or do I leave the typo, allowing the positive attention to cancel out the embarrassment? I usually fix the typo.

2. Sometimes 140 Isn’t Enough!

I’ve never been one for brevity. In high school, I would lessen the font size of spaces and periods in order to get around the page-restriction on my history papers (sorry Mr. Paul). So, being limited to 140 characters is rough for me. When a tweet runs long, I usually spend a few minutes reading it over, cutting as many grammar corners as possible, trimming it down until it’s just a skeleton of its former self. Then, I delete it. Perhaps Twitter could learn a lesson or two from the USA Network, where characters are welcome.

3. Hurting Someone’s Feelings

I have so many funny things to say about the people around me, but the people around me are all on Twitter. You have no idea how many tweets I’ve deleted out of fear of someone finding it. I’m not even talking coworkers, friends and family members. I’m talking straight up strangers. I dream of a world in which I can make a snarky comment about the mean barista at Starbucks without fear of him cyber stalking me and getting his feelings hurt.

4. The @ Reply vs. The Fav

I’m don’t understand social networking etiquette. If someone replies to one of my tweets, am I socially obligated to reply back to them? What if I have nothing to say? I don’t want to clog people’s feeds with a “thanks!”, but I also don’t want to be rude. I usually just fav it, but that seems weird and condescending. Like, “I see you, but I don’t care enough to reply to you.” Ugh. Somebody needs to write a Twitiquette book. I officially nominate Mindy Kaling.

5. Follow Friday

Speaking of Twitiquette, Follow Friday is terrifying. Every Friday, I get war-time flashbacks of planning middle school sleepovers. Staring at the list of names, only being allowed to invite six. Who makes the cut? Who doesn’t? Someone is going to be left out and their feelings will be hurt. So, just like all the sleepovers I never had, I don’t participate in Follow Friday. I don’t get #FF-ed and I don’t #FF anyone else. It’s just better that way. I can’t handle the pressure.

6. FOMO

My Fear of Missing Out has extended itself to social networking. I used to have an obsession with reading every tweet on my feed. It was a constant battle trying to keep up. Luckily, I’ve given up this addiction. I miss A LOT of tweets now, which makes me nervous because what if someone tweets something life-altering and I miss it? What then? Oh, I can go to Kelly Oxford‘s page directly and read all her tweets at once? Awesome. Nevermind.

7. Sub Tweeting

Apparently, “sub tweeting” is when someone expresses their passive aggression via Twitter. Now, I’m ALL for passive aggression. It’s pretty much my main form of communication. However, if you’re tweeting about how you hate when people tweet stupid crap, I will assume you are tweeting about how I tweet stupid crap. This is how my brain works. I definitely think this tweet is about me. I’m so vain. Get over it, Carly Simon.

8. Losing Followers

I’d love to tell you that I don’t subscribe to who.unfollowed.me or check it whenever I lose a follower, but that would be a lie. You better believe I check to see who is unfollowing me. If I could give people an exit interview, I would. I can’t help it. It takes effort to unfollow someone! You need to leave your timeline and go to their homepage and click a button. That’s multiple steps! What have I done to drive you to this point? Have my laundry tweets offended you? I thought we had something special.

9. New Followers

Whenever I get a new follower, especially if it’s someone I admire, I feel added pressure to impress. Whatever I tweet next needs to be good, up to par, gotta keep the people interested. So, I usually just don’t tweet for a few days, which defeats the purpose. No, I’m never pleased. Why do you ask?

10. What’s Your Game, Spam Accounts?

They follow a billion people, have a semi-pornographic avatar and zero followers. What’s the point? Is it just to make people look at the semi-pornographic avatar? We’re already on the internet, we’ve seen worse. I don’t get it. There needs to be a reason for these things to exist. Are they hacking into our accounts? Are they collecting personal data from all of us and slowly taking over the world? What’s your deal, spambots? If I follow one of you back, will you DM me all your secrets?

Feature Image found via bullybloggers