Twitter: A Solution to the Follow Spammers
I’m having another period of annoyance with Twitter. I really feel like I should probably turn off alerts for followers again because right now? I’m pretty much putting people on a spammer list if they have 2,000 people they already follow. I’m also sending out cranky DMs blasting people for doing this sort of following.
For the past two months, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Twitter. I’ve looked at follower counts. I’ve looked at follower geographic patterns. I’ve looked at people’s descriptions. I’ve looked at people’s geographic locations. The point of this is often to determine the geographic location of Australian sport fandom. I’ve read a fair bit on technology blogs about Twitter to help further my own understanding of Twitter to help me with intended mini-literature review in my Twitter chapter of my dissertation. I’ve basically been ODing on Twitter. There is a lot of interesting stuff out there.
But as a user? I’m getting pretty cranky. Seriously cranky. Every day, it feels like I’m getting 2 to 10 follows (across about 3 different accounts) from people who I don’t know, who are not geographically close to where I’m writing about, who don’t appear interested in professional sports, who have low interaction rates, who have 2,000+ people they follow. As part of my research, I constantly ask: What is the ROI for a team on Twitter in terms of where their audience is located? How can they best leverage their network? What can they provide for their fans to induce them to follow them? How can their fans help them? As a user, I can’t see how the people like I describe who follow me gain any benefit from that. (They can’t read me. I can barely keep up with 350. I function more or less because Americans get neglected as they post while I sleep.) (In one case, I got followed and unfollowed by about 5 times by the same user with 4,000 followers. ) As a user, I can’t see what they offer me. They rarely bother to explain.
And this is killing my desire to stay on Twitter. Seriously killing my desire to stay on Twitter. I just can’t. There are people I want and need to keep track of on Twitter for professional reasons. (The personal ones are almost exclusively on Facebook these days. On that level, I don’t feel the need to stay.) If you’re not active on Twitter and you cover social media, people sometimes doubt your legitimacy because you’re not using the product you’re discussing.
What I’d really like is for Twitter to make the following reforms:
1. Add a field for follow philosophy. It can be selecting from a list. It can be freeform writing. This way, when people follow others, they can see if they have a mutual philosophy. “I follow back people everyone.” “I follow friends, family and professional acquaintances.” “I follow celebrities.” “I follow only people with less than 1,000 followers.”
2. Allow people to block people with certain follow totals unless you follow them first. (I want to block anyone with 1,500 people they follow from following me first. If you want to follow me, interact with me first. Otherwise, add me to a list.) This way, spam following by power users is cut back.
The two following methods would help to kill off the Twitter spam following (and yes, your unwanted e-mail notification that you followed me to never read me is spam. It is unwanted and unsolicited and you didn’t indicate any mutual interest.) and help prevent my own fatigue. I use and prefer Facebook more than Twitter precisely because I’m not inundated with unwanted announcements like that.
