6 Million Unfollows Later, Twitter Moves To Silence ManageTwitter | Hacker News Reader

6 Million Unfollows Later, Twitter Moves To Silence ManageTwitter

techcrunch.com

31 pointszemaj8 comments

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way.

I would imagine Twitter would like to increase the quality of the social graph rather than purely the size.

So would I but I can also easily imagine a scenario where some VC or other interested party focuses entirely on one metric, such as "connections".

This seems to be a persistent issue with third party developers. If I was bringing out a service to compete for third party developers on my app, I'd add some sort of streamlined approval process. Some way to guarantee that the rug wouldn't been pulled out from under developers 6 months down the track.

This (and any other move by Twitter to restrict unfollowing in bulk) is just an anti-spam measure.

Direct marketers follow as many people in bulk as they can without being flagged as spam, a small percentage automatically follow them back, everyone else gets bulk unfollowed, repeat. By doing this you can eventually accumulate an account with thousands of followers which you can then pump commercial messages to. The system works but it's a volume game - if you can't automate the process, you can't make enough money for your time. By breaking tools that enable mass unfollowing, Twitter makes the automation harder and therefore fights spam.

ManageTwitter almost certainly knows this.

All ManageTwitter need to do is remove SelectAll as Twitter want and replace it with individual selection upon mouseover, which is still pretty quick.

BaitCrunch title regardless

Crap, I really like Twitter, but as it turns out, depending on a third party for your app, you are depending on a third party. Twitter might turn out to be not much better than Apple in that regard :-(

I don't understand the problem at all. Why would you follow so many crappy people that then you want to unfollow them in bulk?

Thinking about this makes Twitter sound right

There's a simple solution to this: acquire ManageTwitter, and then find a clever way to integrate this to the core service (with controls that Twitter approves of).

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