Say No To Twitter Stalk-Bots
As cool as I’m sure it is to get the thrill of having strangers finding you important/interesting enough to follow on Twitter, I think people need to start paying attention more and blocking stalker-bots and other bloat-causing monstrosities.
Let’s be honest here: Twitter isn’t the fittest boat in the ocean right now, with a tremendous number of crashes and slowdowns this week alone. What isn’t helping are twitter accounts following several thousand strangers at once. I myself just decided to block a new follower who was following over twenty-four thousand people!
Twenty-four thousand. That’s like me trying to keep track of what a third of my city is doing all at once. That’s just messed up. Seriously, even if that account is ran by a human and not a machine, he’s clearly not actually paying his attention to the feed.
So do some Twitter activism. Block stalker-bots (or stalker people) from your Twitter account. That’ll be one less tweet notification that their overworked server will have to deal with.
I like the idea in theory. Visiting each new follower’s page to check, though, isn’t a scalable solution. I’m already past the point where I could reasonably do that. And anyway, visiting their pages means being exposed to the spam they’re trying to shove at you, so they win by losing.
One quick way to address this would be to have Twitter tell you how many accounts a new follower is following in the e-mail notification. Or, alternatively, someone could set up a service like Twitter Quotient (http://web.forret.com/tools/twitter-tq.asp) that you can forward your e-mail notification and it will respond back with the user’s stats. Hmmm…
I hadn’t thought about scaling. It’s definitely one thing when you’ve got 10 followers, it’s another when you’ve got over a thousand.
The idea of being told how many followers a person has is a good one, so is the service one. I’m doubting Twitter will bother adding the first functionality themselves, though, as they seem to have enough technical issues plaguing them at present. Hmmm. I wonder how hard it’d be to jury-rig something like that.
Now I get the feeling I’ll be playing mad scientist over the weekend…