Why I Think @TheOnion Has Unfollowed A Record 485,000 People On Twitter

If you want the hypothesized reason TheOnion unfollowed a record 485,00 people, the author says:

>I assumed whoever it was that managed their social media campaign had decided that enough was enough, and pulled the plug.

The rest of the article is filler.

I certainly hope it's not surprising to anyone that a company following half a million people isn't paying close attention to all of them.

There's little technical reason for The Onion to follow back its followers. Yes, Onion employees could read a random sample of their followers' tweets, or use filtering software that selects useful-looking tweets for human attention. But they can simply use their followers' RSS feeds for that; they don't need to formally follow them back. The only advantage I can think of is that Twitter automatically bundles your followees' RSS feeds together into a single feed. (But I'm curious how Twitter delivers an RSS feed that aggregates half a million talkative users -- does it still work at that volume?)

Naturally, follow-backs are merely symbolic at that scale, so mass unfollowing doesn't strike me as news. It was a little interesting to see the how many immediate unfollows The Onion's move triggered, though.