Hacker News Reader

Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

Being a nobody on twitter can be extremely frustrating if you're tweeting and expecting anyone to pay attention.

I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I'm not surprised users avoid tweeting.

There's kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.

View on HN

I'm one of those people, I rarely tweet. If I do it's usually aimed at one of my few followers (I think I have about 20) that are friends in my field.

Otherwise, I follow people that have more interesting things to say. It's how I know what's going on in the development world. I barely follow anyone outside of my field.

Although, funny thing happened once. I commented on someone's tweet pointing out a bit of hypocrisy and his defense was I didn't have enough followers to warrant being able to say anything in the first place. Apparently I'm in a popularity contest I didn't know I was in.

If you are tweeting and hoping someone to pay attention and no one is, I could understand the frustration.

I'm thinking of getting back into the habit of doing a tech blog that's more for me to keep tracks of the interesting tidbits of information and code I come up with doing my job. I guess that's a similar deal to your idea of tweeting as a diary.

This is a bit of a tangent but why allow spam bots to appear in your followers list? I too have about a hundred followers and I vet every single new follower. I take offense at any spammer that thinks they can just slip in there and be accepted, and I don't want potential new followers to look at my profile and see a bunch of obvious spammers.

This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam.

Quality over quantity, always.

Hmmm, interesting. I just never considered that my responsibility. I'll think about doing that.

One problem with blocking bots is sometimes I really can't tell if they are bots. Bots often copy profile pictures, descriptions, and tweets from real users. Some real users tweet pretty cryptic stuff. And blocking feels like such a serious step; I wouldn't watch to risk false positives.

You are probably better at detecting bots than you think. The same way you can recognise phishing and spam due to spelling or syntax errors. If I get a new follower and the only contact they've made with me is via Twitter, and their tweets are totally odd or cryptic, they aren't adding to my experience so away they go.

I've only had one false positive I know of and it was one of my wife's friends. She had a profile picture of her teenage daughters and no tweet history. I thought 'what the hell is a teenage girl doing following me - guaranteed spammer' only to find out who it was the next day. I unblocked and no offense was taken and no harm done.

Still, I guess I'm a bit stricter than average and this is something that most people don't care about.

You shouldn't waste any more time on spammers by spending it trying to vet your followers. They got to decide they wanted to follow you, but you're in control of the most precious thing we have: our time. Don't give then even 10 seconds that it takes to try and decide their worth. They don't deserve that power over you.

I've never looked at any person's Twitter account and judged them by how many likely spam bots they have. I assume spam bots follow people all the time and I don't hold it against them for becoming victims.

I think think the thing about Twitter is you essentially have to pretend you have a network to actually gain a network. You have to do the internet equivalent of putting yourself out there, because if someone gets to your profile and sees you have no tweets, they probably won't follow you. Its definitely a Catch-22 scenario, but things like retweeting and favoriting can help you build that network without doing stuff that feels too weird. Also using Twitter as a networking tool on top of real life is definitely helpful, as people you meet in real life will probably be more willing to engage with you on Twitter.

I have found that after a good blog post, I gain a new chunk of followers. But I blog and tweet so infrequently it ends up not mattering. I feel like the only way to get a real payoff on Twitter is to be extremely, hyper active on the internet.

> Tweeting feels like writing in a diary.

This is actually one of the 2 reasons why I use Twitter:

- following interesting people (like John Carmack)

- keeping a "diary" of interesting links on a variety of subjects

I'll follow you, what's your @handle?

@humbit https://twitter.com/humbit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com