The 100 Worst People On Twitter

@Rhodri

#DaterProtectionAct

There’s a kinda well-meaning but reactionary argument you hear sometimes from people who “really got into The Killing”. It’s based around the idea that there’s far too many reality shows and, as a result, far too many reality TV stars. What these people fail to realise is that we have an infinitely larger media than we did even 10 years ago, so we need the Holly Hagans and Millie Mackintoshes of this world or else the gossip websites and Daily Mail website’s sidebar would just be full of question marks and smiley faces.

It’s the same with the media class. Despite the fact that printed media as a viable product fell off a cliff circa 2003, there’s still a much larger number of places a journo can work nowadays than ever before. The media landscape evermore resembles a nightclub desperately begging anyone who doesn’t have a visible penis to come through its front doors, in an attempt to improve their female quotient. Hacks are being dragged into positions of fame and authority that their ability doesn’t credit in order to fill space. Rhodri Marsden is one of these guys.

Back when newspapers made a profit, he’d have been the guy who made the coffee. Nowadays, though? Newspaper columns. Book deals. He’s actually verified on Twitter! As if there’s big money from pretending to be a guy who was in Scritti Politti at some point. I know “Blame It On The Rain” was a banger, but that was 20 years ago now.

We spoke, during Tom Chivers’ entry, about the media class and how TC himself is a mere grunt. Marsden is more like a mid-level boss: predictable in his attacks but still an utter annoyance to get past. Like Chivers, his emotional maturity seems to have become stuck somewhere around the age of 15. He still plays video games. He gets really angry at banal facets of life like “someone driving a pink car”. He does that Caitlin Moran/six-year-old girl thing of ironic CUTESY random WORDS in capital LETTERS and saying shit like “skillz”. Valerie Solanas said that all males were in fact women aborted at the gene stage. Rhodri Marsden makes me think we were too hard on the nutbag sapphist.

What really cements Marsden’s position on this list, however, is that he published a book of other people’s tweets about bad dates. Let me break that down for you: Rhodri goes on Twitter. Rhodri asks his followers for details of bad dates they’ve been on. Rhodri then takes these tweets and republishes them in a book, for his own personal gain. I appreciate that for Rhodri Marsden every date is a bad one, because he’s an overgrown manchild, but the idea that a journalist’s twitter followers are supposed to write his book for him now for no reward of their own is just the most craven concept imaginable. At press time, the book was 154,076 in the Amazon rankings and had managed two solitary reviews in six months.

Marsden then went to Bestival on the back of this to host a “Crap Dates Workshop”. It’s a sad fact of life that the people who should be most ashamed of themselves tend to be the most shameless. Also, he looks like a testicle someone drew a face on in biro.

Sample Tweets:

Stop rioting. Please RT.

Does one get ones work done? Or does one slump in front of the telly and watch equestrian skillz? These questions are as old as time itself.

I’m crossing Blackfriars Bridge like a sexy motherfucker. If you’re reading this, mum, apologies.