"Go to Twitter, bro!"
Getting pissed, pissing off others, and everything in between
Prelude:
The man - or rather his company - was able to create an engineering marvel by capturing a rocket booster with mechanical arms. However, he has not been able to make people habituated to the new name of his other company. Twitter it was, Twitter it is, and Twitter it shall remain in human memory!
Just to get the brand attribution right, in my mind at least, I am going to rephrase this as “Go to X, bro!”
Anyway…
Recently, there was some WhatsApp banter where a random dude said one had to go to Twitter - ahem, X - to complain because WhatsApp groups are not platforms to complain or whatever. The discussion was about a company which is, at best, pathetic in its hiring process. The whole Twitter - WhatsApp differentiation was a bit weird to me. And, this was not a standalone incident anyway. There was this other post I saw on LinkedIn by a friend and colleague who was apparently schooling those who posted customer complaint messages on LinkedIn, asking them to use the more obvious mechanism - the customer care hotline. All of us knew he, like everyone else on LinkedIn, wanted to sound educated, civil, unique, elite, and different from the rest - umm, just for a few likes and comments at best by other folks who wanted to pen down golden words that will go down in the annals of Generative AI as crappy-first-set-of-data-that-any-LLM-regurgitated. Anyway, this LinkedIn dude’s point was, “Who cares?”
And, this was the same dude who posted, just two days later, “I am happy to share I am starting a new position…” Makes one wonder if all it takes is a span of two days to forget the most powerful rhetoric ever conceived by the human brain - “Who cares?”
Before revisiting he who asked me to go to Twitter, I feel it is probably best to touch upon the more pertinent topic of customer complaints on LinkedIn. Have we seen any of these brands that actually give a shit anymore about complaints routed via their customer care?
Airtel took 35 days to install an UPS for my WiFi modem, between which Chennai had witnessed a monsoon that was a damp squib and then another from which the city made a narrow escape (the second one gatecrashed my hometown - Cuddalore - by the way). The point is, I needed the WiFi for emergency power shutdowns DURING the monsoon, and NOT AFTER. Perhaps the LinkedIn dude might not know this, but Airtel customer care is trash. Not that LinkedIn would have definitely helped in this case, but…
That brings me to the second company that actually expedited things faster after my LinkedIn rant as opposed to the ticket - actually, tickets; there were two of them - I raised with their customer care. Furlenco. Yes, that wretched douchebag of a firm that robs folks of their credit score by renting out furniture and not picking the furniture back up when it is time.
It could be a chicken-and-egg question as well. Have people started lambasting brands on LinkedIn because their customer care mechanisms are non-responsive? OR, did brands resort to cutting down on their usual avenues of customer care now that folks are anyway out on LinkedIn (or Twitter)?
As an aside, somehow capitalistic Homosapiens have been attuned to think that bad customer service is a hallmark of government services. Not really! Bad customer service seems to be an inherent part of the modern consumer’s horizon where the companies say, “Hey Customer, you were the one that was so pompous about having too much choice as a consumer, right? So what are you here for then? Eff you, and eff your Wifi connection. Now, let’s see how your contemporary hypothesis about choice in the modern society adds up when you cannot log in to work tomorrow from home.”
It’s funny but not surprising that as a species, we would create a emotion-based caste-ish hierarchy of social media as well. Twitter for ranting, LinkedIn for boasting, Facebook for being the Twitter and LinkedIn of slightly older and slightly younger folks, etc. Then there are these other divisions as well, such as labelling Sharechat/Moj as platforms for the illiterate, low-class population. The irony dies a thousand deaths every time someone with this attitude starts miraculously talking about ‘Building for Bharat’.
Personally, WhatsApp works the best as an all-in-all social media app for me. I get important news links and long-reads from friends, good Goodreads-ish quotes from the fam, and I get to post (and boast) about my “talents” as well. Strange that some of my fellow HR-educated folks would come in and comment, “Why would you post this on your WhatsApp story, though? This should be on your work profile on LinkedIn, and not on a more casual social media” and go to LinkedIn the next day to talk about integration of the formal and informal via “work-life integration” (whatever that crap is)!
The Twitter X-periment
Just to check the random dude’s hypothesis to confirm if “Go to Twitter, bro” actually worked, I created a dummy account and posted about the bad hiring experience I faced with a company. As one could expect, the post did not blow up or anything. It did not help that Amaran had released, Kanguva release was around the corner, and the Nobel season was going on - you get the drift! People always had more important and relevant things to talk about that so many others could relate to than someone ranting about a bad hiring experience.
(As a sidenote, you might ask, “Dude, why would you consider a random dude’s opinions so seriously and experiment it?” to which I would reply, “You think that was wasted time You are reading an entire rant-blog that germinated because of that dude!”
I mean, I acknowledge I probably take random idiots’ opinions way more seriously than I should (I use ‘idiots’ in a very collective sense and not pointed at any dude in particular. Because, guess what? If I were to point out any particular idiot, I would have taken to Twitter!))
So, what is the point of ranting to a closed gathering of a few hundred folks than shrieking out loud out atop a hill looking into the abyss? Guess there are two:
To see if there are words of comfort from Good Samaritans - for all my cynical worldviews, I firmly believe the world runs on one another’s goodwill
To serve a note of caution so that others who might not have experienced shit need not have to
It is as simple! Going to Twitter might get good retweets but not always some good words from people who you believe are actually part of your world.
The Twitter question
Beyond all of the philosophies though, I was imagining I was doing a favor to the domain of HR, a field of study which I got a degree on. There is this domain called ‘Employer Branding’, whose job is to keep the public perception about employment, hiring and ‘culture’ clean and dapper. If I were to go to Twitter to critique a bad hiring experience, and assuming the post went viral, then these ‘Employer Branding’ folks have to come together and create ‘The most awesomest work place in Floor 5 of Tower 2 in the Sarjapur Road IT park’ with an asterisk mark stating the exact location of the IT park so as to avoid ambiguity, to overcome that blemish. And just to create social currency for this important award, they should then form a convention and invite HR guests from various other companies to be part of this in-group. And just to please the guests then, they have to create awards to be presented to such guests as part of this convention, which mind you, is already a way to celebrate an award for ‘The most awesome work place in Floor 5 of Tower 2 in the Sarjapur Road IT park’ with an asterisk mark stating the exact location of the IT park so as to avoid ambiguity. Now that one award has led to 10 more, and a convention has been created, they have to re-run this list of awards every year with some innovative titles like ‘HR AI innovator award for using ChatGPT to identify the title of this rather elusive award’. Then they have to find people to receive these awards or create more awards for the people they end up finding. See what a jenga block fall it would be!
Where to go?
The digital compound walls
There are other questions I was pondering upon as well. Can Twitter have an official WhatsApp channel? If yes, and if Twitter is the place to go for complaints, can Twitter’s WhatsApp presence mean WhatsApp is a place for complaints as well? OR, should the platforms themselves perhaps say that their official handles should be present only in their own platform but not in other platforms?
Oh, the self-proclaimed regulators
Then there is this very hypocritical notion about ‘tone’. One of my friends even advised me this - “Dude, you need to watch out for how you rant. Polish it with nicer adjectives so there others do not find a reason to say random nonsense”. Now, where do I even start with it? The feedback was not even about ‘what’ to rant ‘where’. Honestly, I would have looked forward to such an input. Lately, I have realized for several folks, grad school gives pleasant memories. For me, it gives nothing but bitterness. Hence, if he had told me something like, “First, exit all those class groups and these less purposeful ones connected to your alma mater”, I would have embraced that thought immediately (This happened without any input, though. Exiting most of these ‘class’ groups, ‘project’ groups and these localized groups has given some breathing space from constant chatter). But how do I ‘watch out for how’ I rant. Rant is meant to be unstructured. Rant is meant to be a pouring out mechanism. Like this piece that can be called trash, and rightfully so. One cannot really incorporate these fancy theoretical HR concepts of ‘sandwiching’ a rant with a positively-reinforcing opening (“Hey folks, hope you are doing well! Happy December! I am writing this WhatsApp post to rant about…”); the actual message (“Fucking x@|^$ has a fucking pathetic hiring process” “Though there are a hundred good processes thanks to the omnipotent HR team, there is this one tiny, minor, marginal, small, narrow, microscopic, negligible issue I faced with the HR team of ______, and I want to respectfully, politely, humbly, sincerely, kindly, affectionately put forth my rather subjective, possible-to-be-misinterpreted-and-responded-with-#GoToTwitterBro opinions about the aforementioned issue which I am yet to mention; so asking, calling, beckoning, and requesting every royal member of this WhatsApp group to diligently, carefully, and single-mindedly pay attention”); and the closing (which I do not even have the patience to type, so forget it).
Rant vs. Confrontation for Dummies
Going to Twitter to elicit a response from the company with a bad hiring process will be called ‘confrontation’. Given there are four syllables, it should be pretty easy to differentiate it from ‘rant’, a rather innocuous, monosyllabic word. So, let’s draw some differences.
Confrontation:
Going back to the #GoToTwitterBro dude for a useless conversation
Going to a HR convention to ask why people engage in such rent-seeking behavior as organizing useless in-group orgies
Rant:
This writeup
Most of what I write
The message that was apparently supposed to be in Twitter but that which poor me posted on a WhatsApp group
As must be obvious, rant is a better reservoir than confrontation. Typing in Substack is better than spending time arguing with intellectuals with platform fetishes.
To conclude…
There is nothing much to conclude here. Go and rant away, especially when there is even the remotest chance that someone might take the good advice from the rant and make good for themselves. As for going to Twitter, go there and tell Elon Musk that folks are not adhering to the new name of the company - it might be the most useful reason to go to Twitter (brrr…) for a rant. Who knows? Perhaps, there can be a potential (non-)cage match, too.