musings on Twitter, spam, following and blocking

I like Twitter. The main two reasons I use it are keeping up with local people and getting interesting ideas and opinions from a wider circle of interesting people. Another reason I like it is that spam is kept to a minimum by virtue of the way the system is set up. Because you decide who to follow (ie. listen to), it’s impossible for someone to send you unsolicited messages. So it’s not very easy for spammers to get any traction.

That doesn’t mean they won’t try, though. The chief way spammers seem to be trying to get their message out is to follow a ton of people. When you follow someone, the system generates a notification email to say “someone new is following you.” It also gives a link to the new person and I’m sure that like me, most people click on that link to see who this new person is. So the spammer gets one chance to abuse your eyeballs with their message. But that’s it – if you don’t follow them back, then you’ll never hear from them again. (Unless they go the follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow, etc. route to generate multiple notifications.)

On the one hand, you could simply turn off notifications and never be bothered with such things. But there are plenty of innocent followers out there too. Perhaps they found you through someone else they follow and think you might have something interesting to say. Perhaps they’re in the same town or the same field and are interested in your tweets for those reasons. So you leave the notifications on, do the click throughs, and check people out by hand (and get blobs of spam all over you in the process).

Up until recently, this has been a pretty manageable process. The innocents have generally outnumbered the spammers. What has changed, however, is the fact that a bunch of marketers have been telling everyone and their brother that Twitter is a great way to network and get your message out into the world. Well, that’s kind of true, but only if you have the time to develop real relationships with your followers and/or offer them some sort of ‘value proposition’ that would entice them to follow you. But good advice or not, what the marketers have created is this new class of followers to deal with. They’re the koolaid-drinking metrics people, the ones who think that if they get their follower and following numbers high enough, they’ll make more money (or gain more popularity, or whatever). They’re not exactly spammers, but they sure aren’t innocent, either.

The trouble for me with these metrics people is whether to apply my rules for spammers or innocents to them. My general answer is neither; they require their own set of standards. For example, if I see @scobleizer or @jowyang in their recent tweets, or if their tweets are all @ replies and no messages of their own, or if they have thousands of followings and only a couple followers, then they fall on the spammy side of the line. If they have a good mix of tweets and replies, have a reasonable number of followers (100+ ?), then I give them the benefit of the doubt (although I won’t follow them back).

You know, I reckon twitter’s crossed some kind of watershed where the spammers have gone beyond nuisance level to vaguely disruptive – Andrew Barnett

The problem is volume. There are more and more of these metrics bozos out there and it’s taking more and more time to deal with them. I have gotten much more liberal with my use of ‘block’ instead of merely not following back. I don’t want my tweets in their stream, I don’t want my icon on their profile, I don’t want to boost their number of followings. The outright spammers have always gotten blocked, but more and more of these mindless marketing metrics types (ie. the ones who fall on the spammy side) are getting that treatment, too.

It doesn’t help at all that Twitter has virtually no way to manage your followers. The UX is abysmal in that regard. All you get is a list of people you follow and a list people who follow you. It’s not in any intelligible order (not alphabetical, not by date added) and the two lists are not cross-referenced. Oh, there are some third party tools out there which help a bit in this regard, but c’mon Twitter, this is a huge failing.

What I want (so I can turn off email notifications about new followers) is a Recent Followers List. It should be a list of people who have added me in the last 14 (or maybe 30) days, and for each person, it should have their profile picture, their profile information, their number of followings and followers, and their latest tweet. It should also have some kind of check box next to it so I can go down the list, select the ones I want to follow and have it follow them all at once. Likewise with blocking – check all the ones to block and then do it in bulk.

Until then, I guess I’ll be clicking through the links in the notification emails. At some point it will become tiresome, and then I’ll turn off notifications and I’ll miss following back some cool, innocent and interesting people. Which will be a shame, and will definitely diminish the delightfulness of Twitter.