Twitter reacts to posts about Twitter reacting to Stephen Colbert replacing David Letterman

Credit: Comedy Central

Whenever a piece of big news breaks — and Stephen Colbert replacing David Letterman on the Late Show in 2015 certainly qualifies as a piece of big news — you can bet any blog worth its salt will make a post in which tweets from random folks from around the world are embedded or screen-grabbed as a way to show how the “general populace” — because everyone has Twitter, right? — is reacting to said news. These “Twitter reacts to Event X” posts are excellent in terms of bringing in page views — one must assume as much, anyway, since so many sites use the “Twitter reacts to…” format as a way to create quick content — but how are such posts received by Twitter users? We investigate.

For example, here’s the SEO-friendly “Twitter reacts to Stephen Colbert replacing David Letterman” post from Digiday. Man, they really captured some great stranger-generated content there! However, it appears Twitter users are not exactly eager to share the reaction of other Twitter users:

Vibe fared a bit better, with a handful of people retweeting and favoriting the site’s “30 Twitter Reactions to Stephen Colbert Replacing David Letterman” post:

The Wall Street Journal, despite putting their harvested content in the context of the debate over late night diversity, saw a similarly tepid response:

How about us here at FanSided? Keeping with the trend, it appears Twitter users aren’t interested in sharing our post about other Twitter users:

The deep lesson in all this? Gazing into the hall of mirrors of “content” in this day and age, where the line between audience and creator has become permeable to the point of porous indistinguishability and any utterance made on social media can be repackaged as news, is a great way to kill an afternoon of work.

Now please go share this on Twitter.