To put it succinctly: I’ll no longer be writing 140 character quips for stars, followers, RTs, #FFs or any other cyber-trophies. That also means I’ll be distancing myself from the followers I’ve been cultivating for the last 8 weeks—unfollowing, not starring, and tweeting rarely (if at all) myself.

Now that you know how I’m about to change my Twitter usage, please DM me if you’d like to stay in touch on a personal basis. I’ll be sure not to unfollow you.

The thing I feel most sheepish about is that this is the second time in a year I have created a Twitter id, whored out funny for stars (and stars for funny), and quit. I was formerly @TanuTuva and was participating when Favrd was still a thing, and Favstar was in its early days. When my Favrd experience first began, I jumped in whole-heartedly, and had a blast. It was fun to learn ways to make people laugh in 140 characters. Even now when I recognize many of the tricks of creating a good tweet, new twists on the formulas delight me.

I quickly recognized as @TanuTuva that your status at Favrd was directly related to the number of stars each of your tweets received and your number of followers. The only way to call attention to yourself as a new person was by starring people from the leaderboards. How else was someone to know I existed? I could have put out thousands of hilarious tweets, but without a star to my name—in fact, without THREE stars to my name—I would be invisible. So as a newbie, you star stuff. Since there just isn’t that much rip-roaring funny material each day, you end up starring even marginally funny tweets. Eventually you attract attentention, find people who like your humor enough to star your tweets and follow you. Some of them even behave as if they are your friends.

To me, this is the real poison of Favrd/Favstar. When your initial introduction to another person is a star—a star that may or may not have strings attached—you don’t trust the person behind the avatar. And you can’t have meaningful relationships with people you don’t trust.

Neither Favrd or Favstar felt like a community to me. The experience is more like performing on stage for a paid audience. While it’s true that one of the paid audience members may have been genuinely entertained by my act, it would be damned tough for them to convince me.

Which leaves me where I started. Out. For the second time.

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