Twitter's Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About) | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)

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14 pointscruise0213 comments

My biggest pet peeve about twitter right now is how little useful information they provide when you get a new follower via the notification emails.

How about "people you follow in common" or people "who follow both of you"? How about a digest of their last 10 tweets?. Some of this data you can't even get on the site.

They barely hit the minimum bar for a social network.

I've only used twitter for a few weeks, but I very quickly got to the point that I just delete the notification emails without reading them. They don't have any content at all beyond the notification that there's a new follower, about half a bit of information.

I agree with the first two suggestions. I wouldn't want anything the user could generate (like recent Tweets) to be included, otherwise it's just an easy way to spam me.

Twitter actually does have limits on the number of people you can follow. You can follow up to 2000 people penalty free, but above that, you need to have enough followers to justify following any more. From my tests, it seems like the ratio is around 1.1 follows allowed for each follower that you have.

I agree with the article that even 2000 follows is an absurdly high number. One person can't keep up with all the chatter. But for many business accounts it makes sense to be able to keep track of what your fans are saying (and I mean legitimate companies, not the SEO experts and marketing gurus that are taking over twitter).

The main reason I look at ratios is to try to quickly identify a spammy follow versus somebody generally interested in my tweets (perhaps they're a friend of a friend, or were searching a keyword I recently tweeted about).

If twitter had a better way of preventing spam follows, then I think this would be much less of an issue.

Almost everybody I know has approximately equal followers and followees. I block or don't follow anybody whose ratio is not ~= 1.

EDIT: "know" should read "follow"

why wouldn't you follow someone who has more followers than followees? i follow about 20 folks and am followed by 400. those 20 already tweet so much i am not sure i want more traffic than that. what does that say about the quality of my output?

You're making the mistake of assuming a universal "quality of output" function. I have no problem with people following many less or more people than follow them, in my experience they're just not the type of person I like to interact with on twitter.

I'm just sharing the way I use twitter, not making a claim about how anybody/everybody should use it.

We hear that's not what you want. What we are asking is why?

Perhaps what you are really saying is you don't follow people who don't also know you, ie with whom you have a two-way relationship?

Because I want my twitter stream to consist largely of people at my own level, and I have a twitter ratio of ~= 1. People with higher ratios (I follow a few, but not many) are usually so busy or important that I've no reason to follow their tweets, just as they've no reason to follow mine.

I don't mean to be offensive, but I find this ridiculous. Maybe I'm crazy, but isn't it obvious that a user can only follow a limited amount of people before things start getting out of control? I'm sure it would completely destroy my Twitter experience if I were to follow any more than 40 or 50 people. Why should I do that? Just to make my followers feel better about themselves?

My Twitter home page is great exactly because it's manageable... I only see updates from people whose updates I care about. Followers should be something that you have to earn by tweeting things that are useful and interesting for all.

Why should FamousAuthorX be interested in what RandomDudeY had for breakfast?

he shouldn't! I just don't follow FamousAuthorX, that type of guy might be awesome, but he's not who I want on my twitter stream.

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