Twitter’s follow limit has been driving me mad for months | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s follow limit has been driving me mad for months

3 pointsbgilroy265 comments

I use Twitter a lot

I love it, I will keep using Twitter. My problem is that I had had a follow-read-retweet pattern of usage for ~4 years and then 3 mos ago I snapped and started replying to others as well. My interest in the platform went from reddit replacement to a way to try to prove out my own opinions. My reliance on the platform, already high, skyrocketed

About a month later I hit the 5k follow limit. The established method to clear this hurdle is to become “famous” enough for Twitter to lift the cap

Four weeks after hitting the limit, I was frustrated enough to do the scratch maths and found that if I had had a 5k + 100 per month of use where I had sent 100+ retweets I would be fine which seems a simple fix conceptually

I get frustrated because when I have a nice conversation these days I have to go back and find people I had followed ~8 years ago and drop them in favor of someone I just met

I want to understand why this is happening in terms of incentives. I can only assume there aren't a lot of people trying to use the platform this way (unlikely), that Twitter doesn’t staff economists who would know about inflation (unlikely), or that Twitter feels the follow-celebrities concept of their early days is still the best way to sell ads

I know there are tech challenges on the backend and that Twitter is massive, but that seems subordinate to the idea that listening to more people than listen to you is a eu-social behavior

St Francis of Assisi famously prayed “Make me a channel of your peace... O master grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand”

Maybe if Twitter’s excess of revenues over expenses were all swept to the US Treasury less reinvestment rather than used to distribute to shareholders or buy back stock they could focus on promotion of eu-social behavior rather than eyeball/clickthrough optimization?

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-follow-limit

Why do you have to follow everyone you interact with? If you are using this to tag people of interest, isn't it beneficial to use another method anyway once you reach 5k, that will let you annotate and categorize them (such as lists or some non-Twitter method)?

The follow function is intended to get people's tweets into your feed. I can't imagine your feed stays usable when 5k people are posting into it, so it seems to me you are just putting stress on Twitter pub/sub platform to subscribe to more messages than you can possibly consume anyway.

Why does anyone really need that many follows? I limit myself to a few hundreds, removing old connections not to stay under some technical limit but just so that I don't get drowned in noise. I guess everyone consumes social media differently, and some people might want to get everything remotely interesting in their feed (and read a random sample) rather than the stuff they actually intend to read, but once you hit a technical limit why not take the hint?

Create a second account. Create a script to retweet all the tweets recieved under the first account. Have the second account follow the first. Add accounts as necessary to follow the people you want.

Thank you for your help, your time, and your consideration

As I was writing this out, I recognized that the tweets from the accounts on the list I started when I hit the cap are all viewable just by visiting the list

That idea already makes my foot stomping a little petulant, but your idea makes it even easier

I just need a history account, an activism account, a computers/networks/engineering account, a Christianity account, a movie/TV/literature criticism account, an immunology/epidemiology/public health/virology account

Those are my social media consumption workstreams more or less and I could grow each of those to 1-2k pretty quickly but my rate of follows would taper off and it would take a while to hit 5k on each, maybe another decade who knows?

There was an internal group to Twitter that reviewed the policy last year and they dated the policy page that way

They'll probably review it again some time before 2028

I was gunning for a Plotinus-stanning All is One account but I suppose that doesn't fit the current climate

Does anyone know how to tell Twitter engineering that they're screwing up (if indeed you believe that they are)?

Does finance and marketing run the show? Should I be trying to talk to them?

Have you tried using lists?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com