Joe Rogan, podcaster and Ultimate Fighting Championship announcer, has spoken out about what he sees as the demise of social networking service Twitter.
Rogan went as far as comparing Twitter to the downfall of Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster, a popular video rental store chain, dominated the home movie rental industry for years. It fell behind the technological curve as Netflix and other streaming video services became the norm online. Twitter may follow suit according to the podcaster.
Joe Rogan Thinks Twitter Can Be Unhealthy
Rogan takes issue with Twitter users spending too much time online posting complaints and other negative comments. He thinks its unhealthy behavior, and that tweets will eventually die out as a form of communication.
“Why are you spending so much time complaining about other people every day? I’ll tell you why, because you’re not healthy,” he said on a recent episode of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “If I look at your Twitter timeline and I’m seeing tweets 12 hours a day, you’re a crazy person!”
“I think Twitter is going to be like Blockbuster Video,” Rogan continued. “We’re going to look back, ‘Remember when we used to communicate through Twitter? Like, oh my God, it was so toxic. Everybody was so mean.’ We’re going to hit some new thing, next, that is going to read each other’s minds. It’s going to make this seem like nonsense. There is no empathy in these conversations and that’s a big part of the problem. You don’t see the people. You don’t feel their pain, so you can say horrible shit to them. It’s the vast majority of the way people are communicating.”
Blockbuster Video’s Rise and Fall
Blockbuster first opened in 1985 in Dallas, TX. The video rental chain was wildly popular in the 1990s and 2000s while expanding to over 9,000 stores worldwide. Today, only a single store in Bend, OR survives as a privately owned franchise.
A series of bad decisions led to Blockbuster’s demise. Netflix, the first mail-based video rental service, was founded in 1997 as a response to late return fees imposed by Blockbuster. Ironically, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 million in 2001, which would have squashed the competition that eventually led to Blockbuster’s bankruptcy.
Instead, Blockbuster chose to create their own video on-demand service with Enron. However, they weren’t fully committed to the new service. They continued to focus their attention on their physical locations, and gave up on the new digital venture altogether.
Over the next few years, Blockbuster’s business and profits plummeted. By 2010, the company was taken off the New York Stock Exchange. It was too late to catch up to the digital age that had rapidly passed them by. Blockbuster’s lack of foresight and adaptation haunted the company until the very end.
[H/T Daily Mail & Business Insider]
