Twitter Buys Into Spamming Theory And Limits Following
Funny thing happened to me on the way to the Twitter client today. I tried to follow my friends band, Treaty of Paris, and I got a nice message from Twitter. I follow too many people. I need to follow less before I can add more.
This makes NO sense to me what-so-ever.
Who cares how many people I follow? As I have stated before, following someone does not mean you can spam them. They have to follow you back in order for them to see your messages and tweets. Has it occurred to Twitter that maybe I like following lots and lots of people because it helps my third shift go faster.
Is it possible that I like reading random tweets from people I don’t know? I have made new friends by following random people on Twitter. This limit disheartens me.
When you start controlling who people follow, you defeat the point of Twitter. I can understand limits to posting, spamming, but once again, YOU CAN NOT SPAM BY FOLLOWING SOMEONE.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’ve had more spammers than real people follow me during the last couple months, so I can see how Twitter’s starting to see spamming as a real problem. The thing about spammers, although as you say, they can’t spam you on a regular basis unless you follow them, they do give you one unnecessary email when they follow you. And from Twitter’s standpoint, they are taking up space on the servers and even clogging public feeds and things of that nature.
So I can at least see where they’re coming from.
Michael Henreckson’s last blog post..Take Advantage of Gmail’s Auto-Complete Feature To Remember Complicated Addresses
August 20th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I hadn’t thought about that. You raise an excellent point.
August 30th, 2008 at 5:06 am
…although you can set Twitter to not email you. Surely it would be better to automatically opt people out of these emails rather than opt them in. I’m sure half of the Twitter community just can’t be arsed to change the setttings.
Selina Wragg’s last blog post..Tonights The Night
August 31st, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Well, after reading this, I now understand what’s been going on. I keep seeing these messages about people following me, but when I go to check on all these people I don’t see them anywhere. I’ve been wondering what was up, so this explains it. I keep wondering, though, how people decide who to follow otherwise. At least half the people I follow was because they were following me first, and I looked to see if they had anything I wanted to possibly read about.
Mitch’s last blog post..Blog Day 2008