Per Twitter’s Request, We’re Removing Auto Unfollow | Hacker News Reader

Per Twitter’s Request, We’re Removing Auto Unfollow

blog.socialtoo.com

16 pointsbensummers12 comments

For once I agree with Twitter.

Why would you want to automatically unfollow someone just because they unfollowed you? Either you're genuinely interested in their tweets, or you're not.

Because Twitter is about communication and conversations. And if someone unfollows you, it shows that they're not that interested in you.

I totally agree with reciprocating unfollows; I'll happily follow most (non-bot, non-spam) twitter people, because that's what makes Twitter interesting. But if they then unfollow me, clearly they're not interested in forming a communicative relationship.

Personally, I find it a little worrying that Twitter are dictating the use of their API: not in terms of number of requests (which they should be dictating), but what 'good practice' behaviour should be (which, perhaps, they shouldn't).

EDIT: I don't mean to sound so prescriptive; what I mean is that many people use it for conversations and communication; I understand some use it as 'RSS', and therefore - to these people - it doesn't matter if follows are reciprocated. But for those that want to use it to build relationships, auto-unfollowing makes sense.

To be fair to Twitter, they do dictate usage rates, and I think the rates are pretty conservative:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting

As usual, there is a very file line in regulating any social activity, and in this case i think Twitter is very close to crossing it but still not done so.

I think for these who are interested in building true relationships on Twitter current bad practices harm a lot more than removing autounfollow, coz in true relations you don't have that many people to unfollow and can handle it manually easily.

If you're just using Twitter to build out a list of contacts for commercial purposes, that's exactly how you'd use it. That's how most affiliate-spam accounts grow - they follow as many people as possible, wait a period of time, and then automatically unfollow everyone that doesn't follow them back. The cycle repeats indefinitely.

Many of these Twitter automation tools are primarily interfaces for scammers. If the tool was built with that in mind, then it carries a hefty price tag. If the tool's creators were well-meaning but naive, then the scammers get a free ride. I'd guess that Twitter saw the amount of 'internet marketing' done out of SocialToo and decided to reduce its utility a bit.

I don't understand, how would SocialToo help the scammers? Seems to me if a scammer follows you and then unfollows after a week, it would be nice to have auto-unfollow. So SocialToo would help against the scammers?

Scammers don't typically unfollow people who are following them, since it increases the likelihood of those people noticing and unfollowing back. They want you to stick around and learn how to get rock-hard abs in your sleep with a patch.

Twitter accounts are blocked from following too many people if they have a high follower-to-following ratio, so in order to have a large audience, you have to keep this ratio closer to 1.

An 'internet marketer' will follow many people in an automated fashion. Some will follow them back - either automatically, or because the scammer is convincingly faking a real person. The ones that don't follow them back are useless to the scammer. He therefore needs to unfollow them - so he can drop his following-to-followed ratio and begin the cycle again. SocialToo (and many other tools) help with this by automating the unfollowing part of the process.

Promoting scammy affiliate offers through Twitter only scales to an interesting point through automation, so if you break the automation, you break the process. That's what I assume Twitter is doing. The scammers will eventually replace API-based methods with screen-scraping bots, which is what they use for other social sites around the web.

I see - though the main problem seems to be automated following, not unfollowing? Or Twitter should just find a better way to filter than follower-to-following ratio.

You have to think of the goals of the desired user versus somebody trying to game the system. Twitter apparently wants users to not just think about building follower count.

Why would a casual user ever want to unfollow somebody just because that person has stopped following? The only possible reason is to use that now vacant follow on somebody who's more likely to follow them back, which is the exact strategy of scammers taken to an extreme level.

Incidentally, if Twitter really didn't want people trying to game the system, they probably shouldn't have made the system so much like a game.

Unfollow - I think there can be reasons. For one thing, a big follower list becomes difficult to manage. Suppose you auto-follow, and decide to sample a couple of messages from every followee before you decide to keep following or unfollow. That is already a pretty high cost to pay, considering that it is not uncommon to get dozens of new followers every day (most of them scammers).

On the other hand, since I gave up on managing followers, I found that a lot of them sort themselves out by themselves: by the time I check if I want to follow them back, they have already been deleted from Twitter as spammers. Auto-unfollow could help in the same way, by removing those scammers who managed to evade deletion by Twitter.

Granted, I think Twitter frowns on auto-follow, too, but there are some valid reasons for it imo. Also in some cases it jut seems polite to follow back - think strange acquaintance from last party, if you don't have the guts to say "I don't really like you".

I think it is not so simple. Despite of the casual nature of Twitter, there is still a lot of diplomacy and politics involved. To me it still feels like the polite thing to do to follow back if somebody follows me - it is like answering "hello" if somebody says "hello" to you. Except that I completely stopped managing my Twitter followers atm, because it became too overwhelming.

Another example is #FollowFriday - how do you react if somebody recommends you? Recommend them back? Does recommending somebody mean you value your other followers less? And so on - just saying that there are still some issues...

Another issue is that if you are a company and want people to be able to contact you via Twitter, you basically have to auto-follow. People can only send you DMs if you follow them, after all. So if the following-limits become a problem, I could see auto-unfollow help, too.

To me it still feels like the polite thing to do to follow back if somebody follows me - it is like answering "hello" if somebody says "hello" to you.

No, what you're doing is more like inviting someone to your house for dinner because they said "hello" to you.

At any rate, I've found my life to be drastically simpler than many reports of social-media use, and I attribute it largely to the fact that I only follow/friend/whatever people I know and like.

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