Well, here’s an interesting lesson in Twitter dynamics.
I am a nobody on Twitter, really. I follow and am followed
by a small number of people. I’ve tweeted a lot, sure, but it’s just me yelling
in the wind (much like on this blog).
Until last night’s Bengals-Steelers Monday Night Football
game. **update, Shazier looks to be improving nicely.**
I decided to quickly tweet when I wasn’t surprised by Ryan
Shazier getting hurt when he led with his helmet on a tackle, because he has a
clear history of doing that, and grabbed a video of the hit on Giovanni Bernard
in 2015 that actually caused a rule change, actually called the Ryan Shazier
rule (they even had a graphic prepared and talked about it (and the Carson
Palmer and Hines Ward rules) on the broadcast in the second half). This was as
the incident was developing, so I made sure to include in my tweet that I hoped
he wasn’t severely injured on the play:
*typo alert, “hit” was typed to be “he” but #fatfingers
I also made sure NOT to #shazier, but apparently it doesn't matter if you are searching for keywords (so why hashtag anymore?)
So, you can already see that a few (lol) people “liked” the
tweet, but more people didn’t. 44 fine folks chose to comment, a pittance in
most twitter lives, but more comments by far than any tweet I’ve ever tweeted
(out of 10.7K)
BTW, the link is just spam, it’s to a Aliexpress hoverboard for sale.
Here are the ones twitter labeled as offensive:
Bonus points to the last guy for correct use of “you’re." I even "liked" a couple of the tweets to show I was a good sport.
I reported a lot of the abusive tweets, but all the emails I
got from Twitter seemed to agree that none were bad enough for action. Oh well.
I know way too much about twitter and humans to engage any
of these folks other than “liking” a few of the tweets. Twitters emails agreed
with that plan. LOL
I should point out that pretty much all of the commenters
are similarly low-impact tweeters like myself. One guy had over 1000 followers
but has only tweeted about that many times, so this is all small potatoes.
It is, however, my potato field, and I really didn’t enjoy
getting talked about like this. I mean, I’m over it, but I’m also surprised by
how many people actually clicked on my profile to find personal things to
insult me over.
I get it, but I’d still like to explain to some of them that
I’ve said the same-ish thing about Burfict: keep leading with your head and
your career will be cut short, dumbass. That I’m actually a nice guy. At least I'm honest enough to admit that as much as I hate Hines Ward, I'd have wanted him on my team.
Whatever.
The thing is, the empathetic me that is upset I
upset people is also inside the guy that believes what I said was harsh but
correct. Shazier has made a career out of these types of hits, and its likely
cumulative damage that tweaked (still hoping that’s all it is) his back last
night. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the Steelers’ Burfict, you know what I mean? He hits hard, on the edge or just over it, and he's the emotional leader of the defense. Both team's defense suffered when these guys left the game. Well, the Steelers fans love him more that we love Burfict, but there are other
reasons for that. I’ve talked/tweeted about these tackles in general, how one
team changed the way they tackle (more rugby style) and how successful that’s
been (that article actually contrasted them with the Bengals, to my chagrin).
So,
sure, sorry I said “Aw” at the start of the tweet, but pointing out a player’s
habitual hitting style after he got hurt using it and providing video evidence
of what I pointed out, nope, not sorry for that.
I did click on some of the commenter’s profiles and I find
one guy that’s a die-hard Buckeye fan (Shazier played for Ohio State) (oh, and
this is a shitty thing to do, dick, trying to get me unfollowed)
also whined about a very reasonable tweet essentially saying
the same thing:
Seriously, dude. Grow up.
Speaking of that, the only other one I feel like pointing
out is this kind soul in a young guy:
Personal insults? Check.
Assumptions based on profile pic? Check. Best part is his profile is all
Jesus-y:
He’s a kid, I’ll leave it at that. He did retweet JuJu’s hit
on Burfict, so there’s that. #onlybadwhenithappenstoyourteam I guess.
I guess I’ve dipped my toe into the muck. It’s yucky.
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