Viral and other bullshit

This entry was posted in tech windows and tagged Blue screen of Death BSOD twitter on by

Some days ago while browsing Reddit i spotted a couple of pictures that intrigued me. They were pictures of some short of a video wall installation that had just bluescreened in a mall, in Thailand. Due to my interest in BSODs, i found them amusing and without overthinking it, i tweeted them to the myriads of my followers (..a whopping number of about 200 at the time).

The tweet picked up as you can see. It was quite mesmerising watching the origin of people interacting with the tweet change, from Europeans to Japanese and Aussies, all around the globe to Americans and back to Europeans again. In other words, for about 24 hrs straight, there was a continuous stream of Twitter notifications. Fortunately i had email notifications switched off or i would have to deal with a problem similar to the one Edward Showden had to deal with. Anyhow, this is not a bragging post. This is a post of why on earth this should even be considered for bragging rights.

Before i continue, i want to make it clear that i did not take those pictures. I wish i had and upon watching the tweet getting hundreds of interactions, i felt bad for not giving credits where credits are due. Bottom line, i got my 15 minutes of Twitter-fame for simply surfing the web.

Getting likes and retweets has unfortunately become the ultimate goal of the majority of social media users, no news here. Don’t get me wrong, i know that the marketing value in case of products, services and everything commercial in general, is huge. And its value-for-money attribute is disproportionally positive. For example, this Twitter account of a Greek celebrity, used mainly for promoting all kinds of crap:

“Retweet and one of you will win 20 kg of chicken“. Yeap, that is a real tweet that got retweeted more than 20.000 times and in addition, for some reason beyond me, it got favorited more than 3.5k times. Let’s do the math. Chances to win: 0,00005%. Cost of the tweet: Probably zero. Although they may have paid a couple of bucks for promoting it, they probably didn’t need to. I haven’t seen any relevant promoted content in more than one accounts fitting the demographic, so i’ll stick to “zero spent”.  Marketing value: I’d bet good money that the marketing department was more than pleased, since most likely they even got paid to promote the 20kg of chicken of a specific brand. On the other hand, you might want to play devil’s advocate for those retweeting this crap and claim that the cost of their retweet was zero as well. Well, guess again.

But it’s not the commercially driven social profiles i want to comment on, they do have a logical reasoning for looking for attention. It’s all the rest. The craving of likes and retweets for the most meaningless things imaginable. The ratio of things that do deserve to be spread around the world to the those that clearly don’t, is fucking scary. Although i’m pretty sure everyone gets what i am trying to say and has some examples handy by themselves, here’s some more:

https://twitter.com/XoXoCheyyXoXo/status/659204647463206912

https://twitter.com/ImBossingVic/status/659240301349855233

Worthless.

Last but not least, let’s not forget the tweet i posted in the beginning of this post; my tweet. It may be a pretty picture to some, it may give some chuckles to others.

But i can’t fathom why it does get more attention than these:

A sad world we live in. Where meaningless things go viral in a heartbeat while matters of utter importance or efforts of exceptionally smart people are buried in piles and piles of bullshit every single day.

But on the other hand, it’s those kind of efforts that make it a beautiful world, right? Fuck this ongoing worship of bullshit, the glass is half full and always will be, no matter how hard it seems to see it this way.

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