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At some point, Twitter and the rest of social media became less about wanting to share the news and more about wanting to be the news.

Take Justin Bieber, for example.

As reports of the once-angelic and deeply troubled Canadian pop star’s arrest began to make its way around the web, reactions streamed onto Twitter, ranging from jokes to tongue clucks.

But by far, the most common refrain was something like this: “Why is this news??”

The simplest answer is that it wasn’t — at least not the most important news happening on that particular day. But Twitter isn’t really about the most important thing anymore — it stopped being about relevancy a long time ago. Twitter seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another. It’s less about drifting down the stream, absorbing what you can while you float, and more about trying to make the flashiest raft to float on, gathering fans and accolades as you go.

How did this happen?

A theory: The psychology of crowd dynamics may work differently on Twitter than it does on other social networks and systems. As a longtime user of the service with a sizable audience, I think the number of followers you have is often irrelevant. What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity. That validation that your contribution is important, interesting or worthy is enough social proof to encourage repetition. Many times, that results in one-upmanship, straining to be the loudest or the most retweeted and referred to as the person who captured the splashiest event of the day in the pithiest way.

As a result, recency trumps relevancy, which is how a single, relatively insignificant news event can exasperate much of an entire community over the course of a day. There are several other recent events, in addition to Mr. Bieber’s arrest, that have captivated Twitter to the point of exhaustion.

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It feels as if we’re all trying to be a cheeky guest on a late-night show, a reality show contestant or a toddler with a tiara on Twitter — delivering the performance of a lifetime, via a hot, rapid-fire string of commentary, GIFs or responses that help us stand out from the crowd. We’re sold on the idea that if we’re good enough, it could be our ticket to success, landing us a fleeting spot in a round-up on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, or at best, a writing gig. But more often than not, it translates to standing on a collective soapbox, elbowing each other for room, in the hopes of being credited with delivering the cleverest one-liner or reaction. Much of that ensues in hilarity. Perhaps an equal amount ensues in exhaustion.

To say the service is no longer relevant or informed seems inaccurate — much of my day is still spent poring over Twitter, picking out the best links, insights, quips and bits to examine and share later — but it is less informed (and informative) than it used to be. Increasingly, I’ve found myself retreating to smaller groups, where the stakes are lower and people are more honest and less determined to prove a point, freer to joke and experiment, more trusting in one other and open to real conversation.

Twitter once felt more like an electric news wire, with reports coming in from all over the globe, of places and things, experiences and people, and I still want it to be that same place. It can still feel like that, particularly during major news events that are developing in real-time. That’s when Twitter shines as a new medium, when we are all sharing and devouring each new tidbit offered up by sources on the ground, news anchors, rogue eye-witnesses, wry commentators. But the exhilaration of those times may have conditioned us to treat even the smallest incident as one worth dissecting, regurgitating and examining to death. We’re all milling about, infinitely hovering, waiting for our chance to speak, to add something clever to conversation, even when we’re better off not saying much at all.

Twitter is starting to feel calcified, slowed down by the weight of its own users, cumbersome, less exciting than exhausting. It may be why less public forms of communication — messaging applications like Snapchat, GroupMe, Instagram Direct and even old-fashioned e-mail threads and Google groups — are playing a bigger and bigger role in the most meaningful interactions during my day online.

Is the newfound fatigue a facet of Twitter’s relatively simple design? Is it not able to handle the complexity of the many threads of conversation happening at once across the system? Perhaps. Twitter has shown some inclination toward trying to help its users sift through the flow of information to find what suits them best. The company is experimenting with accounts that highlight tweets or accounts that people in your network have recently started following. In the new version of the mobile application, Twitter also serves up notifications when people you follow start chatting about a particular topic, like a television show or sporting event, an informative and useful development. But for now, at least, Twitter has other goals in mind, like transforming the service into a budding platform for e-commerce and other initiatives intended to turn it into a highly profitable service.

But even if the company were to snap to attention and give its community something other than Twitter lists and block or unfollow buttons to help users tailor their feeds, it most likely wouldn’t be enough. We, the users, the producers, the consumers — all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation — are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.