Why I don't follow you on Twitter
Published on 9 March 2013
Regularly, on Twitter, I try to refresh the handful of people I follow. I ditch some, I add others. Given that I spend my whole life over there, it's important.
So I realized there were a few criteria I unconsciously apply when deciding whether to actually follow someone. I'm going to list them here, in full honesty.
Don't hesitate to comment if you too have this kind of stupid criteria.
I don't follow you on Twitter, because:
- You're not funny or not interesting. No need to elaborate here.
- You don't have enough followers. Pretty ugly as a criterion, but if you have fewer than 200 followers, there's little chance I'll follow you. Unless I know you in real life. I inevitably miss out on plenty of good people because of this habit. It's dumb.
- You don't follow me. Even dumber as a criterion. But I tend to appreciate the "exchange" side of Twitter. If you don't feel like reading me, then I won't feel like reading you either.. I automatically unfollow everyone who stops following me, by the way. It's obviously my most idiotic criterion, so I rarely follow new people.. But I often dig through the people who've been following me for a long time, to see if any of them become interesting :).
- You follow too many people. That one I fully own, I've even started to stop following people because of it. Let's say if you follow more than 1,000/2,000 people, I find it twisted, and I figure you don't have time to read everything anyway, and therefore to read me.
- You don't have a photo of yourself as your profile picture. Yeah, it bugs me. If you have a logo, a drawing, or some "manga" thing as a profile picture, it annoys me. So I don't even look. Conversely, if you're a girl, a pretty one, your chances go up quite a bit (what?)
- You're French, but your bio is in English. Go die. Seriously.
- You do dirty RTs. If I notice you often do fake RTs, the kind with quotation marks, or "via @so-and-so," that's disqualifying. You only do that to claim other people's tweets and the RTs that follow. It's completely dumb.
- You do dirty replies. Rarer, but I know some. You put periods in front of your "replies," or worse, you stick the username of the person you're replying to at the end of the tweet, so everyone sees your exchanges. Well, it's annoying, very annoying. I won't follow you.
- You tweet your blog posts 10 times a day. Annoying.
- You do tons of RTs of stuff in English. Once in a while, okay. When it's systematic it drives me up the wall.
- You do crypto-tweets. The kind where you address people without addressing them: "You hurt me tonight, my pumpkin heart will remember it." Okay, once is fine. 12 times, who cares.
- You think you're on FB and you throw out cheesy quotes or pictures. Screw you. As a teenager, were you the type to have posters of babies or ponies at home? Aggravating circumstance when it's in English. FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
HELP.
- You send your tweets several times a day to increase the chances they'll be read. No kidding guys, have some self-respect.
- You always use Paper.li. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
- You do #FFBacks. #FFs are already particularly annoying, but #FFbacks, GODDAMMIT.
- You RT every message that talks about you. Once is fine, twice okay, then it quickly becomes unbearable. We know you're stars and all that, but when EVERY day you RT the #FFs or mentions of people saying nice things about you, it's just too much.
There are probably others, I might add to it. Note that most of the people I follow today do some of the stupid things I list above. They're friends, so I'm tolerant. But I don't hesitate to tell them! Yeah, I'm a bit of a nagging jerk. And you can follow me here: @Paingout.
EDIT: Before insulting me, please read this article, where I elaborate on a few points!
Photo credit: AI-generated illustration
By Paingout