The great Twitter willy waving massacre
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Twitter, Blog, Internet on
I woke this morning and did my usually routine of grabbing the iPhone and checking my email, my text messages and my Twitter feed in that order. Oddly, some people on Twitter appeared to be complaining that their followers had been massacred. Follower numbers had dropped dramatically overnight, they said. I checked my follower count and discovered my faithful followers had escaped largely unhurt from whatever it was that had attacked them. Perhaps it was another Twitter security scare? Nope. OK, maybe one of those hashtag marketing schemes had fulfilled my prophecy and finally started to destroy the Twitter userbase? Kind of, as it happens.
A bit of digging reveals that Twitter has been “correcting follower and following counts” which it says have been “incorrect for some folks” for some time now. Twitter management pushed “a change that will address this issue” overnight which led to a drop in followers for many people, although the actual percentages vary wildly. Twitter does admit that as a consequence “follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes.”
So why has this clean up not impacted upon me too badly? Well perhaps it is because I only have a relatively low follower count of between 600 and 700 folk. The reason for that low count being that I make an effort to clean it up myself on a regular basis, so that I kick off as many of the blatant spam and marketing only accounts as I can. I really do not need the ‘Sexy Brittany Pics’ account or ‘I’m Lonely Tonight’ lady following my every word. Others might be too lazy to do this. Although I have a sneaky suspicion that nearer the truth would be that they are more motivated by gaining the highest number of virtual friends they can in some kind of sad willy waving exercise. Anyway, people with 1000+ follower counts who have not filtered out the spammers will have seen a bigger drop in numbers as Twitter corrects “for spam accounts and data inconsistencies” while “cleaning up artifacts in the system”.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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[…] mention that because if, like me, you are a Twitter addict then you might think otherwise. News of her demise has been spreading like wildfire on the […]
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 8:03 am
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[…] of Twitter was revealed and oh boy was it a sight to behold. Who said Twitter was just a bunch of willy waving celebs polishing egos and plugging books, followed by a bunch of sad geeks with nothing better to […]
Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 10:27 am
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