When you reply via RT a kitten somewhere dies
I went through the history and basics of what a Retweet is last post which you can find here. That post was pretty vanilla and boring with all that information and no belittling of stupid people so lets correct that with this one. 
The first misuse I want to discuss is using the RT button as a reply. One of the nice features of twitter is that when you hit reply it will actually have a link to that exact tweet you are replying to so your followers can see what your tweet is in reference to. In programs like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, they can use this information to show whole the conversation right in the client without having to do a bunch of searches or looking at multiple people’s profiles.
RT @davewoodson: @GuyKawasaki you still not did answer the question that @allynpaul seemed to ask [he is being a condescending guru]
Allyn Hane
AllynPaul
When you use Retweet to reply, this link is now gone. This is especially bad when someone does it in the middle of a conversation. I found the above example today and this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. If the person is referring to a tweet that was said a while ago this only gets harder to track because you have to start looking through whomever they RT’d to try and find the original tweet that might not even be at the top of that users stream anymore. That tweet happened almost 3 days ago and is no longer on Dave’s front page. For me to find what Dave was referring to in the RT I have to go look back through a ton of tweets on his profile page or search for it and hope it shows up. This makes it much harder for outsiders to attempt to figure out the context of your response. You are forcing your followers to do a lot of work for a gain of nothing of your own. As well, there is probably a good chance your follower will not take those extra steps and just ignore it all together which hurts you as you lost the ability to maybe get another person into the conversation. And isn’t engagement with people what this medium is all about?
Oh boy! RT @AllynPaul: @emc440 @ripsup I must admit, I have seen the “breaded mushroom” and have never been the same since.
Eric M. Carter
emc440
Now are there times when doing this can be acceptable? Yes, but only when you are putting emphasis on that one tweet and it stands on its own. This can be when someone makes a great statement you want to share or there is humor in the tweet. But again, this isn’t being used as a reply and really is it’s own stand alone entity. Above is an example one that falls into the acceptable category as when taken out of context it is quite funny.
You say “But I want to share the original tweet with all my followers and give my own commentary on it.” Well, just RT it and then reply. If the person sees your tweet and wants to know the original reference they can easily see it through the reply link. Justin G. (@JGill1) does this well and he is where I first noticed someone doing this. It seems to be very effective at bringing people outside the conversation in without losing the whole conversation in the process.
Well, as I cut and paste the last part of this off so I can continue this in another post I realize that the really mean stuff is still to come with the WTF type of RT’s but those will be for another day. Sorry I got your hopes up for some belittling but I failed. I’ll go take my 20 lashes and get the next post ready.
Wondering about the picture? Get more info here.
Part 1 – Lets talk a little bit about Retweets on Twitter
Part 2 – When you reply via RT a kitten somewhere dies – This page
Part 3 – I don’t remember Tweeting what you just Retweeted – Soon
Part 4 – Personal Style – Soon
Part 5 – Seriously I saw your tweet the first time – Coming Soon – Kind of requested
