Complaints about OPs that are just Twitter links are WAY overstated!

[Denzil_DC]

23. They are, and it's getting very tiresome indeed.

Some folks have complained to Skinner in Ask the Administrators, and there's no sign of any policy about them being changed. Moans like this used to be classed as meta and were a no-no in the main forums.

As a matter of etiquette, it helps if people can copy and paste the tweet text, and any graphic it contains where that's possible, but good luck anyone who wants to enforce that as a hard and fast rule.

This is a good idea anyway, because tweets can be deleted or Twitter can sometimes go down (as happened a month or so ago), in which case all that anybody will see is the bare link.

As a Brit on these forums, I'm used to quite often seeing cryptic posts to "turn on so-and-so NOW" when whatever program (sometimes even unnamed) the OP's watching isn't available where I am, and other minor annoyances like that (such as OPs that are just bare links to a story with no explanation), so it's not a problem unique to tweets.

I don't have a Twitter account (too many other ways to waste my time online without getting embroiled in spats with total strangers, which I probably would despite my best intentions - I can get quite enough of that here), but I do check it out every day and have developed a string of lists and accounts that help me keep abreast of developments better than the MSM can nowadays.

I often post breaking news based on tweets I've seen, but almost always use the actual article the tweeter's found for me rather than the tweet itself.

That's Twitter's beauty - there's so much information out there nowadays, you need some way of curating it, and I'm afraid I don't find the editorial policies of traditional media do a good enough job of this. I use Twitter to crowdsource my newsgathering, relying on people I've learned through observation are generally reliable or have interesting takes on events and issues (I also get a chance to read opposing views I wouldn't bother seeking out otherwise, which can be educational).

If you're not into it, that's fine, but I don't see it going away or tweets being confined to a designated forum, as some have demanded, so the moaning just wastes everybody's time and energy and sometimes creates ill feeling.