HELLO

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Emma and Pete

I was sent three snarky emails this week, one of which is excerpted below, verbatim:

why don’t u follow me on ttwitter i follow u and have followd u for like 6 months now u hardly follow ne1. i dont know why i follow u as you are a boring (very rude c-word) and nuthing you say makes sense you make me real angry cs i dont undertand what you say and I hope u die of canser

Quite what I’d done to warrant someone hoping I die of ‘canser’ is beyond me, frankly – the rest of the email is not new territory to me, though I don’t get called a very rude c-word that often on the internet. Sanctimonious, yes. Pious, sometimes (which is rather good for an atheist). I even got called a misogynist this week, too, which is a first.

My Twitter account has something of a love/hate status in my life. Despite using it for a couple of years already, it still hasn’t found its right place in my day – or rather, I haven’t found a place for it in my day that I’m totally happy with. I’m trying, though, and making progress. This week it passed its arbitrarily large 16,000th tweet milestone, so I figured it would be a good time to share some stuff with you.

One question I do get regularly is “why don’t you follow me”, normally in a more salient form than the halfwit quoted above. Here’s the thing. I don’t follow many people. As I type this, I follow 9 (nine) accounts and inexplicably have amassed ~355 followers. I know all the people associated with the 9 accounts I follow, either In Real Life, or over the web.

There are people who follow me that I have met before (In Real Life), have worked with (at previous jobs), have laughed out loud with, have got drunk with, have slept with, would quite like to sleep with given half a chance (easy, tiger), and yet I don’t follow them back. If you think you fit into one or more of the categories above, here’s why:

I don’t subscribe to the whole Twitter numbers game BS. Yes, you may follow hundreds of people and expect me to do the same, but seriously – how many of those hundreds of people do you actually pay attention to in more than a passing sense? I know what’s going on with the people I follow, if I let in many more people to my brainspace things would suffer. I know when people are having a hard time, and I can do something about it when I know. When I don’t know, I can’t help. When my brain capacity is full of jabber about the latest international happenings, or what you had for breakfast, something else is squeezed out. Pretty simple, really. My brain works in wonderful ways sometimes, I’m still getting used to how it works after 30+ years, that’s just how it goes.

Your life is wonderful, and amazing, and cool, and so on. And you tell everyone about it. Constantly. And, dude, it gets old. Really quickly. Extra bonus points here for if your life is way better than mine and insist on yammering on, that makes me like you a little bit less. Learn when to shush.

Your life is godawful, depressing, monotonous, and so on. And you tell everyone about it. Constantly. And, guess what – that gets old, too. It gets old faster than those people with apparently perfect lives (better than mine, remember). I’m dealing with long-term mental health issues and I don’t need to hear how your job is boring and you had a cheese sandwich for lunch. I’m pleased you had a tasty sammich, don’t get me wrong, but knowing it adds precisely nothing to my day. Apart from some days persuading me to have a tasty bread-based snack, but that’s just wasted calories.

I don’t know you anymore. Maybe I knew you in the past, but – chances are – if either of us haven’t made an effort to track each other down or get in touch over the past months or years, there’s probably nothing there. There’s a reason why we don’t get together, the universe has a tendency to unfold as it should, so why force it? I don’t dislike you, I don’t hate you, I just don’t consider you one of my friends.

You have no quality control or ‘off’ switch. According to Tweetstats, the graphs for my Twitter output indicate some interesting stats: about 20 nuggets of fluff each day, every day. I do have some quality control over what goes out there. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not perfect and some days there’s all manner of garbage. Alcohol and sleep-deprivation affect the quality and quantity of output, often for the better. Most months are fairly predictable volume-wise, however some months I go buckwild and over a thousand bits of fluff are spewed out across the interwebs:

You call yourself a social media consultant. Ha. Snake oil much?

You protect your tweets. I get it, you want to protect your output from nefarious types, your boss/family and whatnot, but unless I know you well, I’m not going to go through hoops to have you decide whether or not to let me read your stuff. This also means that you can’t @ me, your replies won’t get through to me because you protect your content. I’m not the bad man here, you’ve decided to cover your behind by protecting your content. Sure, if you’re spouting all manner of uncontrollable profanity or slander/libel, then limit who sees it, but I have a feeling most people who protect their content are fairly normal people with fairly normal lives. Does your blog have a password? Do you have PGP keys on your email? Does your Twitter output really need to be protected?

You over-sanitise everything. I mean, what, do you have PR department all of a sudden? You used to be so fun and interesting!

When I started writing this post, I said to myself I wouldn’t be judgemental. I don’t think I’ve been successful, but this is how I feel, so it must be said.

Use Twitter for whatever you like. Say whatever you like. Opt-in and opt-out as you like. Most importantly, try and understand why I’m probably not following you – and don’t feel you need to change in order to make me follow you. It’s only a BS numbers game, after all.

Posted in Pete's blog by pete on Sat, Aug 14 2010

Last modified on Fri, Jan 7 2011