TLDR: Real people read reddit, Twitter is filled with automatons mobilized to the mindless application of meaningless optimism.

At some point Twitter was taken over by robots.

I don't know when it happened. I had taken a lengthy break from the social media scene before starting this blog and all I can say is it wasn't quite like this before I left.

Don't get me wrong, I use some automated scripts-- it makes sharing and self-promoting much easier-- but I also actually read my twitter feed and try to interact with other twitter users. Unfortunately, I've found this so far to be an exercise in futility.

After filling my follow list with every famous, infamous, and tangential personality to post using the "Coffee" hashtag, when I sat back to read the stream of tweets that I wrote, I found a lot of favorites, retweets, and links. And not much else. Really, nothing else. And that was fine, for awhile, until I actually wanted to interact with the twitterverse and found it devoid of non-artifical life.

Friday was a case in point. For some ungodly reason (read: coffee), I walked fifteen blocks in a First-Day-of-Spring snowstorm to buy some experimental coffee from Counter Culture at Everyman Espresso. I tweeted about it, twice, both times with the same question.

Both tweets were favorited-- oh if only I could bottle that temporary euphoria!-- and then consequently ignored. So what was the point of favoriting it? My only guess is that there are ever-watchful bots that favorite any tweets with mentions in them. The purpose of this practice is inscrutable. It's certainly not to prompt a human actually responding to it. Nobody seems to respond to anything anymore, beyond favoriting it or retweeting it.

What happened to all the people? Where did they go? I imagine them tucked away in giant caverns like the remnants of mankind from the mostly ill-conceived Planet of the Apes sequels, in hiding after ceding the surface of the internet to automated scripts and link shorteners.

Give Reddit Your Huddled Masses

Reddit is a totally different beast-- less sophisticated in millenial technology keywords like real-time and streaming and attractively designed-- but what it lacks in slickness and the attendent star power (outside the ocassional AMA), it makes up in actual human interaction.

Post a thread on the /r/coffee subreddit and rest assured that if it draws responses, those responses were made by people with human-readable motivations. Now, many of these people might be trollish, ill-informed, uninformed, illiterate, illegitimate, ignorant, mean-spirited and otherwise completely ill-suited to answer your question thoughtfully, but such a rainbow of fruit flavors will both contain corn-sized kernels of true thoughtfulness and wash over you like a refreshing Riccola next to the brushed steel boredom of endless link-dumping, favoriting, and retweeting. There are people here, in the full breadth of the term.

When I reached out for interview subjects for this blog on reddit, I was overwelmed with honest responses and offers. When I asked a simple question about brew methods on twitter, all I got was a couple of favorites, like the gold stars plastered to a toddler's forehead-- fun for a moment before they fall off, forgotten. I won't be leaving twitter any time soon, it can still be a great tool for getting messages out and getting fed messages back, but when I want to talk, I'll stick to reddit. I'll take trolls that will actually engage me to robots masquerading as bona fide personalities who won't.