Attention sports writers who live-tweet games: No one cares

There are gods here (or have been here) who I follow who do pbp often, and sometimes it's mundane, but many times it's mixed with funny/shtick.

Does it clog up the feed? Who the fuck knows. Who the fuck cares. The whole fucking point of Twitter and Facebook is to have a stream of content.

Last night I spent a few hours binge-watching Twitter (baseball as background noise) and replying to many many -- many -- tweets. Most of them were fun replies and some of them shtick.

But that's the entire point of Twitter: engagement. What used to happen here big-time happens on Twitter. It's the best social platform right now.

Clogging up the feed. Give me a break. Either unfollow the clogger or just scroll down to the next tweets. It's not rocket science.

 

If only there was a way to filter out what you don't want.

 

Odd that a college basketball game would touch off a thread that starts April 22.

I guess schieza has spent the past six weeks writing, editing, trimming, honing, soul-searching, and putting in all the blood sweat and tears needed to create this finely tuned masterpiece.

 

I'd hate to see how much he'd write if he actually did care.

 

Fave-star

 

A Facebook friend -- who is only kind-of a friend in real life -- does inning-by-inning pxp of her son's Little League baseball games...all summer long.

 

Is she hot? Does she wear tank tops to games? Does she post pictures of herself in tank tops, whether at games or elsewhere?

If the answer is yes to two of those three questions, her posting is acceptable.

 

I, for one, would welcome a morphing of this topic into a Poin file.

 

Sorry schiezanic, but you're wrong -- at least as far as concerning local preps that I cover. Some of the play-by-play tweets have the most activity (impressions/engagements) of anything I tweet.

Case and point at a high school regional final basketball game last month, I picked up 35 followers through one game and had a couple hundred favorites and retweets of play-by-play action... for a game that was not only broadcast on local radio, but was also broadcast on the state's big cable provider's HD sports channel. And I see retweets of PBP stuff all the time from the athletes I follow. Many of the teenagers I follow (athletes at the high schools I cover) are not watching the average game on TV, nor or they watching some "gamecast." They're depending on Twitter for updates.

 

I'll have to disagree with you, although I do agree that PBP is boring on twitter. But I don't agree with your premise that anybody that cares about the game is either at the game or following it live elsewhere. During prep football, my twitter engagement explodes because I post scoring updates from the game I'm covering. It's extremely popular and I'll usually add 200-300 followers just during football season.

But like I said, I don't do PBP. My tweets are more like "Heading into the second quarter, Podunk leads BFE 22-10." We have a couple of guys who won't tweet or can't tweet during games, and they get roasted on twitter for not providing updates.

 

This thinking pops up often -- not just from you, Schieza, but from a lot of folks -- and it drives me as crazy as bad live tweeting does you.
If this is the case, why do we even do what we do for a living? I mean, everyone who cares has already seen the game by the time we write about it, even if it's an online story 20 minutes after the final buzzer. The rest won't read it anyway. So why bother with this whole enterprise?
We sometimes forget that the reason people play sports is because of the games. I think there's a segment of the sportswriting population who would be just fine if there were no games at all, just practice.
No matter how great a feature you write, how hot a breaking news story is about a roster move, injury or scandal, the whole reason anyone gives a damn is because athletes play games that matter.

 

You guys are reading schieza wrong. The content of what he says never has a point worth discussing. Only by considering the anger and the spittle is it fun to read him.