Twitter has no mechanisms for this. Every user floats by themselves, interacting with who they please. This denies us the ability to build communities, to set social norms, and to enforce them. Twitter has absolutely no way for me to share with others that someone isn't a person I want in my communities; unless they do something so bad as to actually get banned from Twitter (which takes quite a bit of effort! Far more than it does to get kicked from any of the IRC channels I moderate).

As much as I like the article's sentiment, and I too dislike social media in general, I disagree with this statement.

Twitter has "community" based in exactly the same way Hubski does in-part: following users.

Seeing communities is remarkably easy for anyone following more than two people.

For instance, I follow 272 people at the moment. While Twitter has no mechanism natively that I know of to sort these into lists, years ago I was able to do this with a client (I imagine that ability exists natively today, I don't know).

I can see "community" in the kinds of people I follow. John August, Gary Whitta, The Black List, Quote/Unquote Apps? - Screenwriting.

Matt Hullum, Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola, & others? Rooster Teeth.

Beau Willimon, Kevin Spacey & others? House of Cards.

.Net Magazine, John O'Nolan, Dribble & others? Design/Development.

I have a feeling that he thinks this isn't community because it isn't self-contained. It's reliant on you, the user, to sort through. Personally, I'm fine with that. Or perhaps he thinks it isn't community because it seems one-directional, but I don't know how he'd get that impression - I've interacted with the majority of the people I listed above on twitter.

I've also seen community build around me as people follow me. This generally happens after I use a hashtag (something I almost never do). There are a bunch of Star Trek RP'ers following me from when I was "President" of star-fleet.com (largest ST RP Writing Club, and the longest lived at ~23 years - I'm not there anymore). Same for a bunch of people I knew from High School who follow me for reasons I don't know. Same for a bunch of random #tea lovers that popped out of nowhere when I started doing reviews of different Adagio Teas. Same for a bunch of Scholastic Journalism students for when I was doing that stuff.

For all of the complaints to have against Twitter, lack of building and interacting with communities is not a valid one. They're all out there. This guy sounds miffed that he didn't get invited to the cool kids table, when all he had to do was say something. I intensely dislike Twitter, don't get me wrong, flagamuffin's point about it destroying journalism is (closer) to being true than this community complaint.