Be warned: If you’re still subtweeting your foes, you’re completely out of style.
John Gara / Via BuzzFeed
Last week, writer Ann Friedman lit up the internet with a pretty standard "New York City isn't that great" piece called "Why I'm Glad I Quit New York at Age 24." It elicited a Jezebel thinkpiece and countless tweets complaining about her message, her age, and New York. All par for the course. One tweet, a subtweet actually, from writer and Emily Books founder Emily Gould went as follows:
As Gould's missive passed through my timeline, I expected to see someone call her out for making fun of Friedman — or at least jump on the passive aggressive bandwagon. But there was silence. Though this is, perhaps, to be expected. The subtweet is out of fashion among the media elite who live on Twitter — and soon it'll pass out of style for everyone else. The new rule: If you want anyone to pay attention to your beef, name names.
(My working definition of subtweeting is talking behind someone's back for the delight of your followers with the added benefit of not being explicitly rude because you don't mention them by name.)
If you're looking for further proof that the complicated social behavior Twitter's power users obsess over has lost its trendiness, just take a look at Drake. At a recent public discussion at New York University, an attendee asked the rapper how he feels about his lyrics being used for subtweets against exes. Drake's face twisted up and he announced to the audience, "Twitter isn't real," adding: "There's no gauge in real life on it."
"Indulge in it," Drake says. "But don't live your life by it."
Music writer David Drake (no relation to Drizzy Drake) tweeted a few weeks ago, "twitter destroyed music writing more than free mp3s ever could." The complaint was nothing out of the ordinary for Wednesday morning Music Twitter and he was met with mostly tepid responses of agreement from other music writers. But a few hours later, the writer was barraged with tweets from his former colleague Ernest Baker who said (now deleted) things like, "you're pathetic. you will die sad, lonely, and mad about rap music," "you talk shit about my writing but haven't written a successful article in [sic] a year," and further accusations of a fight over money and that Drake is "fat, broke, irrelevant, and jealous."
Baker's rant started with a simple manifesto: "don't subtweet."
Right before Baker's tweetstorm, Complex senior editor Foster Kamer — a long-time Twitter rabble-rouser — predicted the trend, tweeting, "Let 2013 hereby be known as the year of say it to my face (on twitter) motherfuker. No more bitchassedness on Twitter."
No more bitchassedness, indeed. When it comes to Twitter interactions, direct mentions are equivalent to a shot in the gut. Subtweets are more like spitballs flying from the back of the class.
Music journo Twitter isn't the only sector where this is happening. Politico's Dylan Byers attempted to take Circa's Anthony De Rosa to task for a piece De Rosa wrote on Medium about how to be a better reporter. He properly @replied him to make sure DeRosa saw it.
