Skeptoid: Brian Dunning's Great Twitter Clusterfuck of 2009

[Ian David]

The Semi-Great Twitter Experiment
by Brian Dunning, Sep 17 2009

I stand before you today to confess perhaps my greatest clusterfuck of the year: the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment, which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me.

I have an upcoming Skeptoid podcast episode for which I want to include some informal survey data (it’s the September 29 episode, #173, and I’ll update this page when it’s available. The topic and the results will all be revealed on that day). I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter for its potential to virally spread information. So I thought it would be a clever idea to combine my survey with Twitter, which (I thought) would be a lot of fun for everyone and would accomplish two goals:

1. Virally spread awareness of my podcast, Skeptoid
2. Get a huge number of respondents to my survey

Well, it worked. The good parts worked better than I hoped, and unfortunately, undesired side effects were just as potent. Now, before I describe what happened, let me state outright that it was shockingly naive of me not to foresee what would happen. It was dumb, it annoyed a lot of people, and I have no excuse other than failure to think it through very well. So, my apologies, and I offer no defense of what turned out to be a giant mess.

More:
http://skepticblog.org/2009/09/17/the-semi-great-twitter-experiment/

[TZ]

1. Yeah I started to answer it

but it seemed well, kind of useless to me.