On Aug 12, 2009, at 11:42 AM, Dewald Pretorius wrote:
Personally I think that is a mutilation of the use and purpose of
Twitter. I surely hope people would not judge me based on who is
following me.
I would not judge you. No, I never take it that far. However,
consider if a politician was on Twitter, and a mass follow of spam
porn bots hit that person up. People unlike you and I, and others on
the dev list here, very well will get the wrong impression, simply for
lack of understanding how this all works.
Whether it is a mutilation of the use and purpose, I can certainly see
your point. Though to be honest, I do not know a person who has not
looked up one person, to find who they follow and who follows them.
It very much is the entire premise of myspace, facebook, and linked in.
I personally use it for that purpose all the time, though I have
learned based on username and profile picture how to discern a real
user and a bot pretty easily with relatively good accuracy.
It does muddy the pool, and make me have more pages of stuff to wade
through.
The only way one can maintain a "clean" list of people who follow you
is to block those whom you don't want as followers.
Also, you can privatize your account, which to be honest, I wish was
not even an option, as that indeed is a mutilation of the use and
purpose of twitter in my humble opinion.
But tell me how feasible it is to remove followers once you get past a
few thousand?
It is going to
cause the suspension of many innocent Twitter accounts if people block
others simply because they do not agree with their political views,
the way they comb their hair, or their profession.
Can you elaborate on this? How does a block of a twitter account end
up as a account suspension? Do multiple blocks tally up and end up
being used as a way to suspend an account?
Followers do no, zero, nada harm. Just let them be.
I think I have shown how they do in fact harm. Even at a very basic
level, if a army of bots were to follow you, say, a million of them,
what would you do? You yourself would look like part of the army, you
would not be able to maintain that account easily, if you put aside
your ability to programatically remove those bots.
Follower and following as also an at a glance metric I use to see how
interesting someone may be. If they have 5000 followers, but only
follow back 100, I can gauge immediately the type of twitter use that
person is. If they have 5000 followers and around the same following
counts, I know there is no way they are engaging all 5000 of those
people, and that account has less value to me.
These are pretty rough generalizations, but I certainly do not agree
with the "no harm" statement. It just depends on your use and how you
define harm, which to me is defined as inconvenience.
On Aug 12, 3:28 pm, Scott Haneda <talkli...@newgeo.com> wrote:
If I go to someone's account and they have 500 followers, 90% of them
are adult porn and social media experts, not only do I get the wrong
impression as to what that person is about, but I also have a
completely off kilter signal to noise ratio.
--
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *
