Comments on: “Gaming influence”, or: How do you end up with 30,000 followers and 30,000 followees?

By: » eConsultancy unfollowing 19,000 people? Sorry, not good enough :: Milo Yiannopoulos

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:35:54 +0000

[...] enough In Announcements on January 15, 2010 at 12:35 am I would not be so vain as to imagine that my contributions to the “gaming Twitter followers” debate, nor the post it prompted by [...]

By: Jonna

Jonna — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:05:08 +0000

A good indication is to check how many Twitter lists they’ve been added to. Given their extremely high follower numbers the three accounts you linked to have low list numbers. E.g.

@briansolis – Follwers – 39,905. Lists – 2,689
@steverubel – Followers – 35,224. Lists – 1,817

In comparison with:

@rhys_isterix – Followers – 36,207. Lists – 284
@mazi – Followers – 33,848. Lists – 522
@joe – Followers – 28,571. Lists – 174

Something’s not quite right.

By: Olly

Olly — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:14:26 +0000

Great insight, although I think potentially your last paragraph is a step too far. Great to understand why these people don’t stop following the accounts – it really is just junk / noise / bs.

By: sampicli

sampicli — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:27:58 +0000

Gaming followers is totally pointless.

I did it for a while (hence 2000 followers when I mostly tweet the garbage I’m currently eating and photos of weird stuff I see written on bus stops).

I stopped after, 1) being banned for the 2nd time, 2) realising people are actually less likely to follow you if its obvious your account is being run by a bot.

Anyway: here’s how I did it.

Note: ‘Reciprocal accounts’ are accounts that automatically follow whoever follows them – and who automatically follow other accounts (in the hope they follow back in return).

Firstly I registered 100 fake twitter accounts (there is a limit of 10 per day on Twitter). I set a script to choose a random account every minute, and follow a random account (found from the public timeline).

Then… you can assume that anyone who follows back is probably a bot themself (set to auto-follow anyone who follows them. to keep their followers/following balanced) so you follow these accounts from your main account – for a guaranteed +1 follower.

Anyway, its totally pointless as an account with 30,000 followers, 30,000 following actually looks just as spammy as an account with following 1000, followers 3. People aren’t likely to follow.

And obviously following 30,000 people you are not really following them, you’ll have a separate account to actually follow the people you want to.

Another problem is you will be suspended if you attempt to use the API to unfollow people in bulk. Twitter staff advised me to unfollow 100 users a day.

It’s stupid. Most of these bot-driven accounts will also unfollow you if you unfollow them… so you’re stuck with a stupid looking 30,000/30,000 im afraid.

And yeah its totally an ego thing. but again, ultimately pointless as twitter itself is a sack of trash and follower counts are not worth worrying about. We probably wont be using this rubbish in a few years.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:27:57 +0000

I completely agree with you. I don’t see what the point is of following someone if you don’t _follow_ them and read what they say. The “follow them and filter them in tweetdeck” concept for me is a bit pointless. Why follow them. I painstakingly BLOCK people who follow me but aren’t interested in my conversation. I’m a purist, and if you have 20k followers and your tweets are all links to shit of you’re blatantly just following me so I follow you back, I block you.

However, we also have a work account, (@vzaar) as well as each having our own personal accounts. On our work account we don’t have the time or the patience to block anything but the most blatant spam bots and even then many get through. Another problem is for people to DM us we have to follow them back. I think this is why many WORK accounts can plausible use follow back scripts (we don’t).

Regarding the last point, I think Twitter could solve this problem by creating “work” or “business’ accounts. These could be verified for added goodness, but would have some different properties. You could receive DM’s from any follower without having to follow them back. In fact I would see these accounts as not having any “follower” counts as it’s meaningless. Just “follower” counts. (in fact remov Asuncion’s ing both would stop a lot of gaming). One of the great thing about twitter and why it works is the asynchronous nature of it, but I think there would be some value in having a type of account which known to not read the user feeds of it’s user. Business accounts like ours, support accounts like @btcare, etc etc.

In fact they could even charge for this, at http://vzaar.com, we would pay.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 01:35:24 +0000

Looking over the exchange between you two, he didn’t out-an-out deny that he’d ‘artificially’ inflated his follower count, as you say above. He answered no to your question “One last time. Did you or did you not artificially increase your follower count using a script or paid service such as uSocial?”. I see a difference there.
But anyway, this is an interesting issue -using followers as an absolute indication of authority is clearly bullshit, but do the wider public really understand that? How can this kind of (alleged) gaming be actively discouraged to help people make better decisions over who they follow and listen to?

By: Olly

Olly — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:52:21 +0000

I suppose having that number of followers forms some sort of social proof / demonstration of credentials and inclines people who land on your profile to follow you. That said, it’s totally undermined by the fact they follow so many. How can they form meaningful conversations with people when their incoming stream must be mainly noise?

More importantly, it’s just a bloody waste of time, if the followers aren’t engaged in what’s being pushed out it’s not going to convert into anything meaningful for the brand / organisation or person tweeting is it? Why waste your time? What does it add apart from loads of volume but no meaningful communication.

This mentality of volume over quality that seems to exist everwhere needs to die.