Top Twitter User Unfollows 106,000 People | Hacker News Reader

Top Twitter User Unfollows 106,000 People

mashable.com

18 pointsAjJi14 comments

"Much like MySpace, it seems, users are learning that having 100,000 “friends” you’ve never met is much less valuable than connecting with a select number of people you know well."

That's hardly a new discovery; I remember when I first tried out this "Internet" thing in '95 I subscribed to all mailgroups I've encountered just because I could and it felt cool to receive mail from people in places like South Africa.

Obviously I quickly learned that it wasn't a very good idea but the point is that the concept of reducing spam by not giving out your contact details to anyone (or in the case of social networks, not following / accepting as a friend anyone) is not new at all.

Curiously that closing line is one with which I completely disagree. Someone once described the difference between Facebook and Twitter as "Facebook is for people you used to know, Twitter for people you want to know".

Speaking for myself, I get a lot of value from Twitter by following people that are smarter than me, and mostly, I don't really "know" them, and they mostly don't know or follow me back. I don't care for follow-backs, I care to get their wit, their pointers, their knowledge, their humor.

For "people you know well" there's meatspace, or Facebook when geography makes the former impractical.

> "When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page."

I don't think it's fair to call it "spam" when you have chosen to follow the accounts who are "spamming" you (it's certainly not unsolicited tweeting). It's not spam, he's just been sloppy in choosing which accounts to follow.

nope, he set his account so that whenever someone follows him, he follows them too.

that's how he got so much spam. bots started following him.

Whether he chose to follow them automatically or not, he's subscribing to their updates. That's does not fit any definition of "unsolicited" I know of.

Yeah, that's a problem of the "That cactus is dangerously spiny!" "Well, then stop trying to tackle it!" variety.

I don't think it's their updates that are being classed as spam as much as the direct messages that they send. It's certainly arguable that if you follow someone you're subscribing to those too, but I think it's less clear-cut.

True, I wouldn't say he "subscribes" do their DMs. But, he has decidedly opted-in to them sending him DMs.

At least we now know what caused the ddos attack, massive unfollowing by people that disconnected from Scoble.

Actual article here: http://scobleizer.com/2009/08/05/you-are-so-unfollowed/

Interesting article. I only follow 100 or so people, and there is no way I could catch up on tweets that happen while I'm sleeping or on a plane. Too boring.

Follow Friday should be followed by Scalpel Saturday. Cut away all the people whose updates you really don't care about and never read. Make it a 1-1 thing: Don't follow anyone new without purging someone. It really makes Twitter much more enjoyable and useful.

Keep it real. You won't get tons of followers but you won't hate it either.

To limit the number of followers you can have but not to have a limit at the number of sources you can follow seems to me to be the wrong way around!

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