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Tweetdeck went down last night and I doth lost my shits

What is life even

Twitter logo on screen with tweetdeck
Image: Marketing Land

I have a general rule about social media; I generally don’t use it after hours on weekdays or on the weekends at all. There might be the rare sports-related tweet on the weekend or a latergram that pops up, but generally, I try to disconnect every day and keep my eyes, thumbs, and brain out of social media for at least a few hours. It’s like using pre-workout. The off-cycle time is just as important as on.

But last night I was watching a particularly mundane and unfunny movie and wanted to send a scathing tweet about something completely unrelated. After all, if we’re not out here shitposting on Twitter about the world around us, does it even exist? I clicked to open Tweetdeck on Chrome. It did not work and redirected me to Twitter web, an experience akin to your date taking off their clothes only to reveal several militaristic penguins standing upon each other, one wearing what appears to rubber genitalia on its beak. Do you continue or abort?

I immediately searched for “is Tweetdeck down” on Twitter, which is very close to smelling your own finger after it’s been in your own ass. You know damn well what it smells like. According to random Twitter users, Tweetdeck was in fact down. I felt my blood pressure rise. I felt the shakes begin to creep through my bones from deep within my body. My finger felt kinda itchy and both dry and wet at the same time.

So I grabbed one of Josiah’s Hallmark Channel mugs, filled it with piss and bile and ran out into the streets, hurling it through the first vehicle I could find. How else could I express my unbridled rage at the government while also cracking wise about movies and opining randomly about Kevin’s oddly sticky hammock? Through Twitter on mobile? That’s like trying to cook a five-course dinner using only a can of Sterno Canned Heat that’s actually a can of tuna that expired in 1974.

Twitter on mobile is a user experience akin to your mother smacking you in the mouth every single time you chewed loud, and it’s also the act of loud chewing

Loud chewing in a generally quiet public restaurant and the guy is on speakerphone. He’s on speakerphone, loud chewing in a restaurant, talking to his mother, who cannot hear him and unbeknownst to him, is furiously masturbating with a cheese grater and a bent can of White Claw and for some reason, you know this. That’s Twitter mobile. So I conceded, I’d use the web version.

Yet, when I went to the web version to send my late night, unnecessary tweet (as if there is a necessary kind), I noticed that it was just a larger, shittier version of Twitter mobile. It was a waterfall of the spewing void, slapping it’s derisive and disgusting genitalia across my cheeks, demanding the window be immediately closed, tweet not sent. I stomped around the house, expressed indignation at the long-deceased fish I keep in a shoebox and considered using Facebook, but ultimately decided against it.

I have since forgotten the joke that I wanted to tweet last night. Chances are, like 99.999% of the content out there, it was pointless and would add no value to our lives. My forced patience paid off, as while there are still some outages with Twitter and Tweetdeck, it’s at least working for me. You see, without Tweetdeck, Twitter is about as functional as replacing your fingers with bananas. Sure, for about a day it works, but after that, it’s just fucking mush.

Tweetdeck is the organization that Twitter requires. Without it, we have a snapshot. A moment. While that might be what Twitter intended itself to be, so much of what we do is tied to columns, lists, timely replies, and snarky clap-backs. This is all undone when it’s buried in the Twitter homepage UI. While casual users might find Twitter web and mobile acceptable, those using Twitter for business or questioning reality and the universe on a daily basis cannot properly function without Tweetdeck. It is the needle in which we inject Twitter into our brains.

At the same time, we’ve lost our fucking patience. Sure, Twitter is integral to a lot of business functionality, but everything related to programming, coding, and servers must go down sometimes. Either for a patch, a bad line of code or an update. Instead of patiently waiting it out, we completely lose our fucking minds.

So the weird thing, Kevin, is not that Twitter was slow to update its own status page, but that we as humans are now unable to just shrug and walk away from the social media hellscape even when forced to.

Today is another day. Tweetdeck is back. We can again function in the world, for whatever that means to you in this year of bullshit, 2019. It only gets worse from here.

What do you think? Is the web version of Twitter as bad as I make it sound? What did you do while Twitter was down? What is the point of existence if not to shitpost? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Defunct writer. Exhausted. Ephemeral existence for ephemeral times. Don't email me.

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