I have been living in a plane and six time zones the last few weeks so I have not really got my thoughts fully together lately.
Today is election day and we will have an all-time high in digital yelling. I will be part of the noise because I love dipping into the streams from wherever I am if the right thread happens to show while I am catching up on news in my network. Blame it on $10/day Verizon international package. This is one all-time high that I am not buying. Facebook (the constellation of properties) is the digital bank of choice, and they will benefit the most, but short term it is not a healthy all-time high. Lately, they are plagued with fake news, not just a billion people yelling, chatting and sharing photos.
As for Twitter, I continue to believe letting Trump abuse it’s terms of use for the sake of ‘free speech’ was a mistake they will find hard to recover from. Hate does not scale in a way that Twitter or any mature platform needs to scale.
Even Glen Beck, the master of digital ‘hate and fear’ has seen the scale of hate come back to haunt him as he mellows.
I like this post from Kara Swisher on how bad digital yelling and abuse have become. Specifically:
Translation: People have become giant assholes online and especially on social media.
Me too, as it turns out.
This weekend alone on Twitter, I called FBI chief James Comey a tool, GOP VP Mike Pence a bubble head, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway bitter and Gingrich a putz.
I maintain the last one is entirely accurate. But overall, it seems like I have become exactly like the man I think has most exemplified this terrible phenomena, Donald J. Trump, tweeting-bully-in-chief.
He’s been the first true Twitter presidential candidate, seizing every single aspect of the social communication tool for his own.
He’s loud, he’s clever, he’s mean, he lies, he brags, he tells a narrative. All of it is compelling. In contrast, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is not. Not that this is a bad thing as a human being, but in this peculiar digital space, Trump wins, wins and wins again.
I am guilty too of late.
When I started Wallstrip in 2006…I knew that covering stocks at all-time lows would get more traffic than all-time highs. I chose all-time highs. I call it my ‘Oprah versus Montel’ theory of traffic and branding. After CBS acquired us in 2007, I put together TWO ‘all-time low’ shows as a test. The first was about Donald Trump and his recently failed enterprise. I followed with a ‘man in the car’ interview covering the $SIRI/$XMSR merger. Both easy topics to cover and get laughs and bigger traffic but both worthless at helping people make money.
Not much has changed in the hate business since the beginning of time. Easy to produce, hard to look away, easy to get caught up in but a bitch of a hangover.
Love and optimism scale better and create more value.
Try it.