Inadvertent presidential comedy tweet reminds me of how Twitter used to be

Yesterday just after midnight US eastern time the US president Donald Trump made a queer tweet and it stayed up online for the next 15 hours until someone finally clicked to the game and took it down. What is 'covfefe'? Nobody knows. But it kept the twitterverse entertained for a long time and it reminded me of the good old days of Twitter before trolling and extreme views ruined the party for everyone.

Because Twitter used to be fun and light-hearted. Not any more. Every tweet these days is ideally centred at one pole or other end of the political spectrum and people spend hours and more defending unimportant viewpoints because they just cannot let go - and smile. Covfefe reminded us all for a while how much we used to enjoy using Twitter before the left-and right-wing trolls emerged to muddy the waters.

Usually, the only time you see so many people focused on one subject like Covfefe is when there's a terror attack in Europe. This time, there was nothing so dire to energise people, but they were entirely busy making light of a sorry situation - where the idiotic leader of the free world goes gaga again. This time it wasn't a stupid error of policy or foreign relations, it was a neglected tweet that somehow managed to evade the censors in the White House for a good long time. And because Australia was awake for most of that time, most of the best action was coming out of Australia. Although there was a cute Covfefe song two guys in the US came up with yesterday. All in all it was a grand festival of hahas, and we can only hope that we get another opportunity to make merry in the same way in the not-too-distant future. We all need to lighten up a bit, I think.