The Last Tweet: Trent Reznor Quits Twitter

One day when they write the history of Twitter perhaps there will be a short passage about when Nine Inch Nails lead singer Trent Reznor decided to quit the 140-character social media tool.

Reznor announced his intent to put away the Twitter feed via the official NIN.com message board with a long, rambling commentary/tirade covering a variety of media, music and personal issues. The 640,000+ people currently following Reznor will just have to deal.

It’s been an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so. Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional record labels and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world – I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while.

He goes on to express his displeasure with online communities:

The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.

Based on Reznor’s forum post, part of the reason for his decision to suspend twittering is the online community of Metal Sludge.

“Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across,” Reznor writes. It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will f**k make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could f**k.

It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn’t stop there – hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious).”

So that happened. The Metal Sludge forums are no doubt busy today.

Whether or not Reznor returns to Twitter is unknown. But for now… silence.

“I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result,” he concludes. “Idiots rule.”

What do you think about Trent Reznor’s decision to stop using Twitter?