Comments on: On Twitter, if you follow back reflexively, the spammers win

By: Arun Manansingh

Arun Manansingh — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:46:18 +0000

Good post.
I too have been following fewer and fewer people back recently. I try to follow people that have meaningful things to tweet about. I have been recently bombarded by spammers and find myself blocking them and pruning my follow list weekly.

By: John Bauer

John Bauer — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:43:15 +0000

I have to put myself into the supportive camp as well. As a more recent Twitter user … I found myself quickly looking at my follower’s recent tweets in order to determine if they would be a source of interesting content or more distractions/alternative motivations.

By: Peter Kretzman

Peter Kretzman — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:47:31 +0000

James, Roger, Alex: it’s gratifying to hear from all of you how you emphasize the interaction aspect of Twitter when choosing whom to follow! When I write a post like this one, with lots of negative examples, it’s easy to forget that a lot of folks out there are NOT falling prey to the kind of reflexive following I’m writing about.

I didn’t go into further anti-spam actions, but I definitely encourage unfollowing AND blocking spammers at every juncture, whenever you have time and energy. It’s like urban graffiti: if you don’t paint over the graffiti immediately, it just creates an environment where you’ll get more.

Thanks for commenting.

By: Alex Beamish

Alex Beamish — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:01:38 +0000

Of course.

I get E-Mail notifications when I get a new follower. Occasionally I reciprocate, but only if a review of that person’s posts looks interesting. I don’t care how many people follow me — that number is totally unimportant to me.

I don’t often unfollow someone, but did so after a recent exchange that didn’t sit well with me. No great loss.

By: Roger Hjulstrom (booksbelow)

Roger Hjulstrom (booksbelow) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:55:11 +0000

Good points, I have been following fewer and fewer people back. One of my prime requirements is that they are someone who interacts, I too review their last 10 or more tweets, mainly to see if they do interact. I agree, following back spammers only gives them more power and visibility. I probably should take the extra step and block them also, but have been using the method of them eventually unfollowing me if I don’t follow them back.

By: James Watters

James Watters — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:56:43 +0000

Peter,

This is of course exactly the right thinking, but I’m almost shocked that people auto-follow in the first case. Generally before I follow anyone I read their last 40 tweets pretending they are in my feed and seeing if I’d be interested.

I then carefully prune people from being followed if I find their content outside my area of interest on an ongoing basis–again its no vote on their social value to me–as I think some in your above scenario confuse it to be.

Perhaps all of this relates back to the myspace/FB friend phenomena where its more about a mutual interest in adding friends than content? But this is confusing to me as the whole reason to use twitter instead of FB is how wonderfully content rich and content driven it is…so I’ll admit it, I’m not your target person for this piece, and I’ll echo your sentiments and encourage everyone to focus on the value of content on twitter instead of a vague sense of social obligation to be popular and fair to all.

Thanks-
James