A recent article in the The New Yorker predicted the end of Twitter and said it was because the product is confusing and there is growing wave of harassment and abuse.

Three incidents that happened recently gave me a realization that Twitter could very well end up being a virtual ghost town in few years, albeit for an entirely different reason.  

I recently had a call with a prospect, and I had read some of his posts in twitter, read his posts and favourited a couple of them that I liked.

During a phone conversation, I casually mentioned about the great post on Twitter. It turns out that he was using IFTTT to fetch data, using something else to rewrite a summary, posting it to his blog, and finally posting it to his Twitter. Hmm….

Then I thought, if someone favorites my tweet, then it is definitely a genuine person behind that Twitter account. It was then that I came across another tool that said “Grow your Twitter audience while you are sleeping” – what does it do? You guessed it – Auto-favourite!!

If you have played enough video games, especially alone in the night and you have killed all your enemies and wander all through the map, alone with no enemies left, suddenly a strange feeling of loneliness creeps in; I had the same feeling about Twitter.

It is turning fast into my IFTTT stacking tweets in Buffer, spitting out auto fabricated tweets and another app to auto-favourite. The media talks about the number of retweets and favorites as if all this reflects real people! Possibly the only time a tweet is seen is when someone clicks on the media reference.

What we have today is the equivalent of answering machines talking to answering machines with fewer and fewer humans on Twitter. In all likelihood there will be none, as more and more people realize that a computer favorited your tweet and there is no one reading anything at the other end.

Ah, the third incident? Coming across this study conducted in 1993 by James Katz about people’s attitudes towards voice response units and telephone answering machines.

Once you take away the trust and add the risk of things going wildly wrong with a single tweet, the only way Twitter will be able to grow is to keep up the illusion of growth – keep the phone lines busy, but who is actually talking?

To revive twitter, trust must be brought back to the ecosystem and make it a place where humans have to be awake and present to interact with other people and grow their human followers.