64% of Tweets Are Totally Boring

A new study in the Harvard Business Review confirms what you probably already know if you've spent any time on Twitter: Just 36% of tweets are actually worth reading. Another 39% are "just OK," and a full quarter aren't worth your time. That's according to 1,443 users, who evaluated 43,738 tweets. The tweets that scored the best were funny or exciting thoughts, tweets that shared information or asked questions, and even self-promoting tweets—particularly those that included links.

Those that scored poorly? Opinions or complaints (unless they also shared useful information), conversations with other users, useless posts ("Good morning, world!"), and posts about what users were doing ("Eating Mexican for lunch."). "Many people probably think they’re an exception to this rule," writes Maura Judkis in the Washington Post, "but unless their name is Lady Gaga, that’s probably not the case." Of course, @newsereditors tweets are never boring... (More Twitter stories.)