Not For Me

I'm so amazed at people that blindly follow people on Twitter. Do you really want to follow just anyone? It's no fun in your stream is filled with people who are annoying. I follow people all the time because my friends are friends with them. Then I unfollow them because they are irritating, or too negative, or whatever.

Even weirder are the people that search phrases on Twitter, then follow them because a person said a certain word.

The other day when everyone on Facebook was posting that Ellen video about how gay teens are committing suicide at an alarming rate and how we need to do something about it, a friend of mine posted it saying that this is a free country, and people should have the freedom to choose to be gay. And while I appreciate the vaguely supportive sentiment, that's so wrong. You don't choose to be gay. You are gay. Or you are straight. Or you are bisexual, or you have sex with horses. Whatever. You don't choose to be gay anymore than you choose to be straight. (and if you chose to be straight, you're probably gay.)

So anywho, I made a comment about this on Twitter, and all these conservative news story Twitterers started following me. I'm not sure if they saw the word "freedom" and thought I was one of them? Or if they thought I was saying it was wrong to be gay? Which certainly wasn't what I was saying. In fact, it's the opposite of what I was saying.

I also said something a few weeks ago about how I don't care about football, and a bunch of football enthusiast tweeters started following me. The same happened when I complained about hiking.

I guess people just follow people in hopes that they'll follow them back to raise their numbers?

I don't care enough about my numbers to blindly follow whoever starts following me, or to start following someone just because they mention a word that's on my radar. That's not what Twitter is about for me. That's why I follow so few people. If you're not popping out quality tweets, I don't want you clogging up my feed.

6 comments:

Poppy said...

Agreed. I somehow have 282 people I'm following. Half of those are friends, half of those are news agencies or services or (gah) celebrities. I would go through the world to pair it down way more but really I just wait for a tweeter to annoy me and I unfollow them. I'm still following someone I REALLY don't wanna follow but they haven't annoyed me enough yet to commit to the unfollow process.

Poppy said...

*world=effort... it must be time to eat.

shiny said...

I stalked your Twitter feed and found the two-part post. It looks like someone was combing a phrase like "ellen" and "sexuality" and found part one of your tweet, thinking that you AGREED with the person you were quoting. Bizarre...

I've also had some random auto-follows in my time. I remember saying something along the lines of "the shoe's on the other foot now" and was followed by lots of online footwear retailers...

Robin said...

Weird. I've never noticed if people follow me because of something I say on Twitter, I should keep an eye on that. I really try to be honest with myself and not follow people out of obligation but only if I enjoy their company. Unfortunately it's more difficult with the real life friends.

Amanda said...

Poppy- I do follow a lot of news agencies. I follow celebrities, but mostly just the comedians.

Shiny- I just don't get it!

Robin- I feel guilty if I unfollow someone I have "spoken to" online, but sometimes people just aren't meant to friends.

Avitable said...

I think most of the people who search and follow are spam bots. Except me, when I search for "tranny porn" and follow anyone who talks about it.