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If you're not famous, joining Twitter is painful

90 points by diego 15y ago

tluyben2 15y ago
Exactly the reason why I never really liked Twitter; people seem to care about obtaining a maximum follower count and do not really look at quality. Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. Sad. Same sadness as Facebookers with thousands of friends. Maybe go do something useful? Twitter can be fun and when you get followers because you are interesting (somehow), it's fine. If you actually care however how many followers you have and if you monitor and really care about your follower growth, there is something emotionally wrong with you IMHO.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- RodgerTheGreat 15y ago
  Sounds like Twitter is really an MMORPG with a uniquely minimalist set of gameplay mechanics.
  - tluyben2 15y ago
    Ha! In THAT case, they did a great job!
    - RodgerTheGreat 15y ago
      The article would suggest they just need to work on tuning the leveling system- the initial grind is too much for some newbies.
- antihero 15y ago
  > Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. It's only really douchebags who do this. The only thing that's good about more followers, is that more people will hear what you have to say. This is a good thing. "Status" in all shapes and forms is a pretty retarded social construct to say the least. I don't care if you have followers, have a nice car, have a cushy job or have an iPhone. I care about what someone does and says.
  - tluyben2 15y ago
    But a lot (LOT) of people spend their entire day comparing the size of their ehm things with others and only 'feel happy' when theirs is bigger. Twitter (and Facebook as well) shows what happens everywhere, in most houses of most people, but then in public. That's what makes it, for me, quite bad advertising for the human race, even the more technological inclined.
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      So what, why do you care? A lot of people use their cars as a status symbol, should that stop you from using a car?
      - tluyben2 15y ago
        I don't care, but most people do :)
        InclinedPlane 15y ago
        Most people do not drive sports or luxury cars. Most people on twitter do not have thousands of followers. Maybe most people desire such things but most people seem to get by without them.
        tluyben2 15y ago
        Doesn't say they like it; I know plenty of people who look in envy when their neighbor buys a slightly more expensive middle class sedan and will replace their own as fast as they can, even though they can impossibly pay for that. So no, they don't get by, they just do it on a different scale; no sports cars, but with big screen tvs, middle class cars etc. You think most people buy the latest 3d tv because they want to watch stuff in 3d? Some people probably do, most just want to have something more than others.
rlpb 15y ago
Lose your ego. Develop a genuine interest in other people. If you aren't interested in anyone else, then what reason do they have to care about you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influence_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influenc...
- geoka9 15y ago
  Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked? I fail to see any other legitimate use of it.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    Then your curiosity, your imagination or both have failed to engage. I got a job through Twitter once, along with countless examples of professional and personal advice, guidance and encouragement. I can easily communicate with far-flung friends without the freighted expectations of long-form letters. I can maintain a professional network and stay up to date on new technologies and open source code. It's a decent chunk of why I have my career as it currently exists, if I'm to be honest.
    - geoka9 15y ago
      Fair enough. I guess I just don't dig communicating via SMS-style messages. EDIT: And, having pondered that some more, it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest. No, I certainly don't dig it. Although I can imagine following tweets of a person I'm really interested in, but that would only be 2 or 3 people--close people like girlfriend and relatives.
      - danilocampos 15y ago
        > it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest. It needn't be even remotely like that. You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why. It's okay to not know about some things. And it's okay to not have your curiosity draw you to certain things. But when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about, why go on asserting that ignorance as fact instead of asking questions and learning more? Why enshrine your ignorance in lengthy words, insisting others take a bite? Here's what it's most like, for me: IRC. Where you're the bouncer and the channel contains whomever you'd like. The messages are brief but that's their only resemblance to SMS. 140 characters is more than ample to share thoughts or directions toward interesting content. There's plenty of communication, if you choose to use it that way.
RegEx 15y ago
Social media gurus preach brand awareness and engagement, but the truth is most people care more about the actions of a common squirrel than you. http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel
zdw 15y ago
If your number of followers/friends/fans on Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. is how you measure your self worth, you might want to readjust your values. HN Karma is a much better method. :P
whazzmaster 15y ago
I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting. Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the twitterverse at-large?
corin_ 15y ago
If you only want to be on twitter for your ego and you don't actually have the ability to massage that ego, then who honestly cares. The three suggestions in this post... just no. I get why people follow celebrities, I don't want to myself, but many people do so fair enough. But follow random people, and get random people to follow me? Twitter is a communication tool, just like email, Skype, whatever. It's quite possible for it to be useful with the people you actually know, you don't have to use it as service for finding people you don't know to make yourself look popular.
- diego 15y ago
  You're missing the point. The most value I get from Twitter comes from interacting with other people, especially in serendipitous ways. It's not about being followed by random people at all; it's about following (and being followed by) people with whom you could have interesting conversations.
  - spooneybarger 15y ago
    So you want a synchronous relationship in an async medium?
chmike 15y ago
Just subscribed a short time ago and didn't have the same experience. I started following some interesting people, from my point of view, and I immediately got followers. I suspect that some people follow new subscribers with similar interests so that they follow back expecting the new subscriber to see who they are. The other thing I did was to tweet a private message to some known person who answered me. So this might have caught some attention too if it was seen by others. Since one has to follow both people involved in a "private" communication to see the exchange, this could motivate people to follow me.
- darksaga 15y ago
  I've been on Twitter since the beginning and have had the same experience. Start following some people, post some interesting things and you'll get followers. Another way to get followers is to either pimp a product or complain about a product. More often than not, you'll get some followers and you might get a response. Either way, I've loved it. It's very stream of conscious and a great sounding board for me.
jrmg 15y ago
How about following people you actually know, and then using twitter as a communication medium?
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Yuuuup. Twitter is just a communication mechanism. If you're not leveraging synergies and monetizing your social media with new configurations of value that's not a problem in the least. Twitter is not some multi-level marketing scam that you need to exploit. It's a way to keep up with people you like or people you are interested in, famous or not.
  - brad22 15y ago
    better luck next time
p4bl0 15y ago
Twitter isn't about having the maximum number of followers. It's just another way of communicating and get news and updates from people / groups / whatever more instantly. If you find it painful to not have 180k followoers then you're kind of a looser. Sorry to say it like this. But this kind of attitude lead people to mass-follow anyone to have some follow-back and that's creating spam and it's kind of borring for normal-non-followers-needy twitter users.
- diego 15y ago
  There's a difference between having 180k followers and having 0. Having 0 is painful because you tweet into nothingness. My observation comes from trying to get many of my friends started with Twitter, only to see that their tweets get lots in the continuously-scrolling timelines of the five of us who follow them back to get them started.
  - p4bl0 15y ago
    No you don't tweet into nothingness: your feed is public which means that you can for instance show your last tweet on your blog/homepage/... and use twitter as a quick update tool for visitor of your blog/site/... Also, you can use hashtags to join a conversation (this is done better with groups in status.net). In the same time start to follow people who say things that interest you (news, links, personal update, event coverage...). If you're not interested in any of the use cases above, then why start using twitter at all?
    - diego 15y ago
      First off, no reason to downvote me because you disagreed with my comment. My point is that if Twitter is trying to get past the point of people who do the things you say (savvy social media people) and cross into the Facebook mainstream, they need to give people easy ways to be heard. My post is from the point of view of the company, not the potential users. Why start using Twitter at all is exactly right, and a problem for Twitter.
      - 15y ago
benjash 15y ago
Like all social media, its no fun if you have no friends.
antihero 15y ago
Why would people follow someone that doesn't actually exist? Twitter is for people you already know, people they know, and then people that take your interest along the way. It builds on existing friendships, as opposed to starting with nothing. You might get lucky if you say good things to the right people, but if you have no friends in real life, don't expect to be Mr. Popular on Twitter.
serichsen 15y ago
This is a matter of expectations. What did you expect? I opened a twitter account when I noticed some people who had interesting things to say and who did this on twitter. My expectation was a little "news" feed. Then, while I was at it, I tweeted some things of my own, mostly expressions of political opinion and insights. I also retweeted some things I found interesting and worthy of attention. Suddenly, I had 3 followers. I did not expect that, but I thought that it was great that someone was listening to me. That did not change my expectations nor my behaviour. Follower count? Who cares? I have 12 followers. Among them are a handful of people that I respect very much, and I feel quite honoured that they are willing to listen to what I say. This feels much more important to me than 100000 people following some sort of lolcats.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
So people still don't understand Twitter after all this time huh?
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  It never gets old reading comments, or in this case a whole blog post coming from people who are unable to grasp how Twitter is actually one thing but is repurposed for a myriad of others, much to the enjoyment of many of its users.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    I just don't understand the blog post anyway. "It's dumb to try to rack up followers just for a number" right after "I can't get any followers". Find a way to use Twitter to get content from people you like. My Twitter is a combination of an RSS reader and a way for my friends to share quick thoughts or links. There is overlap with Facebook and overlap with Google Reader, but there is lots of content that I get from Twitter or discover on Twitter... that I can't find elsewhere. I feel like if people spent more time following people they knew or developers they like or project/product managers, etc, they would actually see the value in Twitter, rather than trying to take this ivory tower approach.
    - geoka9 15y ago
      I think I now know what my problem with Twitter is. I'd like to follow some developers I like, but I just don't feel like reading about their personal life or random thoughts. And this seems to be a big part of any personal Twitter stream.
      - flamingbuffalo 15y ago
        that's the benefit of being able to quickly (and silently) unfollow someone. Personally, I use a "3 tweets in a row that are annoying = unfollow" rule. It works well for me. And anyways, you'll often be surprised at how someone you respect professionally can be ver entertaining in their personal life.
BenSS 15y ago
I never cared much about my 'follower count', yet I've had some fantastic conversations and gained a lot of valuable info via Twitter. I've got barely over 100 followers, and a small proportion of them are people I know in real life. Maybe twitter should be promoting the use of hashtag topics more, since that's where I've found new people to follow and gotten followers by contributing.
cruise02 15y ago
Are you really complaining that Twitter is too hard? It's taken me a couple of years, but I've accumulated over a thousand followers on Twitter. Some of those came through my blog, but most came through Stack Overflow where I'm a moderator and active contributor. The point is that you have to actually do something to make people want to follow you. Why would people give you their attention (even micro slices of their attention) otherwise? Also: > I don't want Twitter to start looking into my Gmail and follow people who are on Twitter. seems at odds with: > This is why you should be very afraid of Google+, they give people an instant audience. That's very powerful.
openbear 15y ago
Twitter is NOT about mindlessly collecting a vast number of followers ... unless you're a CEO trying to market your various companies. Seriously folks, look at the author / submitter ... "CEO of Flaptor, maker of IndexTank (indextank.com) Hounder (hounder.org) and Trendistic (trendistic.com) among other things." ... this is the blog of a CEO who is trying to build a reputation and / or brand awareness. Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind the intent of the author when reading the OP. "First, let's admit that part of what makes Twitter interesting is egos and follower counts. There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500. When you join Twitter you are the bottom bitch." I guess this is how folks with something to sell see Twitter. It's not how anyone else I know who uses Twitter socially (as opposed to as a marketing tool) see Twitter.
- Helianthus 15y ago
  >There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500. There is something about this attitude that is genuinely evil.
theflyingswami 15y ago
I'm with the author of the article on this one. Call me egotistical all you want but yeah, I tried Twitter for a few days and got really bored with it. The author's complaints basically mirror my short Twitter experience. If I tweet something and literally have 2 or 3 followers who will see it, why not just send an Sms? Pointless. So, I need a larger group of followers, no? But what motive does Twitter have to get me to bust ass and try to build a follower base? None. I already took the time to build a friend base some other social network and I'm in no mood to start that process again. As a means of getting up-to-the-minute news and information,Twitter excels. But yeah, count me out.
arthurgibson 15y ago
If you're not famous, getting a reservation is painful...this is the truth for a ton of things. Stoking the fire never hurts. Funny thing I tweeted at this guy and got no response.
cdr 15y ago
I have zero followers (I only really use it to respond to other people), and Twitter is incredibly useful to me. It lets me easily and naturally interact with well known/popular people I otherwise wouldn't normally have any reason to interact with.
deleted 15y ago
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aperrien 15y ago
I posted this in the article itself, and I think it's relevant here: The concept of location-based communications is a very powerful one. Imagine that you were new to an area, and you wanted to meet locals with similar interests. You should be able to create a tag about something that interests you, and broadcast it out to people within, say, 1-2 miles and invite like minded people out to coffee, or a movie, or some sort of similar event. This provides a way to create real-life followers and build interests off of that. If nothing else, I my end up writing something to do this myself... I've wanted an app like this for a while now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to build it on Google+ when their API comes out.
v21 15y ago
If you don't have friends to talk to and to listen to on a social media service, don't be on that social media service.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
I'm not famous, and twitter is awesome. I use it to keep up with my friends and it works fantastically well. If you don't have friends who use twitter or don't have friends maybe your experience would be different.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could be used to filter out who you interact with. The slider would set the popularity threshold. You may prefer your account to interact with accounts that have roughly the same number of followers as yours, with roughly the same number of followers and the same karma. In this system, following someone is no longer a binary proposition: you follow someone at a given threshold. If your threshold is set below the number of followers of the account, you don't see their tweets, and they don't get to count you among their followers. As you move the slider, your view of Twitter changes to match the threshold: accounts you may have followed at the higher threshold drop off or become visible as you change settings. Why do this? Well, if you're a new user, you may be tired of contributing to someone else's power-law distribution. Why should you enable the rich to get richer? Why not join a system where you can interact with other users at comparable levels? Twitter is losing the Johnny-come-lately's anyway. So there is an opportunity to encourage interactions that go beyond the discouraging power-law phenomena in which a few users have most of the followers. As Satan said, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." A follower threshold feature could enable this, and it might generate interesting analytics.
petercooper 15y ago
No more painful than starting a blog, a podcast, or even a GitHub account. You have to actually produce stuff to get attention in any case.
unkoman 15y ago
Why do you even want followers? What makes you so interesting?
dr_ 15y ago
Tell that to the teenage kids who were using twitter to communicate to people that they were under assault. They were able to do it discreetly, without having to vocalize themselves by a phone call. Twitter has it's usefulness, but not everyone has realized it just yet. I hope that changes - maybe the upcoming integration with iOS will allow it to. Depending on how far it's integrated, it can provide developers some amazing tools to work with.
socialmediaking 15y ago
Get an autofollow/unfollow program which just follows people based on keyword, followers list, following list, etc. You put a couple of interesting tweets, and interesting username, and a background and profile image. It follows those people, see who follows back and then after a certain amount of time unfollows the ones who don't (or everyone) pretty easy way to get a lot of people seeing your tweets.
radarsat1 15y ago
> Help me find newbies like me, who want to follow and be followed! This is otherwise know as a "business opportunity".
brianwillis 15y ago
I thought this article would be about how hard it is to get a decent Twitter username now that spammers have taken up so many of them. That was my biggest challenge, but Twitter doesn't really seem to care about the problem.
- wtn 15y ago
  They would rather pretend to have 400 000 000 users than eliminate the crap accounts.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sacrilicious 15y ago
As a premise for a blog post this isn't a particularly veiled attempt at armchair quarterbacking twitter, and closing with 'k, now go follow me everybody!' clangs instead of adding to the argument. I guess people who use this reasoning as their entire purpose for interacting online turn me off to the point that I don't anticipate ever joining Facebook, and still find very little compelling about G+. People post to G+'s generic-looking interface instead of blogging, and get piled on with comments, losing both personality and clarity in contrast to something like Tumblr or traditional blogging. Twitter and Tumblr are two great tastes that taste great together, however you want to utilize them in my opinion.
prawn 15y ago
Even as a marketing tool (and the same applies with a blog), you cannot expect an instant return. You start with zero followers just like a blog starts with few readers. You don't give up just because no one's listening, you create a bit of history by effectively loss-leading - writing content that no one will initially see and contributing to what you might want Twitter to be. Over time, through search, links from your blog and interacting with other Twitter users, you will build up some interaction and (if that's what you're there for) influence. I suppose the impatience and expectations of new users are that challenge for Twitter, though it'd be nice to see more people realise this for themselves rather than wait to have it solved for them.
notatoad 15y ago
if you don't have anybody who wants to follow you, and you don't particularly want to follow anybody, then yes i suppose joining twitter might be a confusing process. but that's because twitter isn't suited to you. tailoring a social web service towards antisocial people is probably not a good business strategy.

90 points by diego 15y ago

Exactly the reason why I never really liked Twitter; people seem to care about obtaining a maximum follower count and do not really look at quality. Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. Sad. Same sadness as Facebookers with thousands of friends. Maybe go do something useful? Twitter can be fun and when you get followers because you are interesting (somehow), it's fine. If you actually care however how many followers you have and if you monitor and really care about your follower growth, there is something emotionally wrong with you IMHO.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
RodgerTheGreat 15y ago
Sounds like Twitter is really an MMORPG with a uniquely minimalist set of gameplay mechanics.
- tluyben2 15y ago
  Ha! In THAT case, they did a great job!
  - RodgerTheGreat 15y ago
    The article would suggest they just need to work on tuning the leveling system- the initial grind is too much for some newbies.
antihero 15y ago
> Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. It's only really douchebags who do this. The only thing that's good about more followers, is that more people will hear what you have to say. This is a good thing. "Status" in all shapes and forms is a pretty retarded social construct to say the least. I don't care if you have followers, have a nice car, have a cushy job or have an iPhone. I care about what someone does and says.
- tluyben2 15y ago
  But a lot (LOT) of people spend their entire day comparing the size of their ehm things with others and only 'feel happy' when theirs is bigger. Twitter (and Facebook as well) shows what happens everywhere, in most houses of most people, but then in public. That's what makes it, for me, quite bad advertising for the human race, even the more technological inclined.
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    So what, why do you care? A lot of people use their cars as a status symbol, should that stop you from using a car?
    - tluyben2 15y ago
      I don't care, but most people do :)
      - InclinedPlane 15y ago
        Most people do not drive sports or luxury cars. Most people on twitter do not have thousands of followers. Maybe most people desire such things but most people seem to get by without them.
        tluyben2 15y ago
        Doesn't say they like it; I know plenty of people who look in envy when their neighbor buys a slightly more expensive middle class sedan and will replace their own as fast as they can, even though they can impossibly pay for that. So no, they don't get by, they just do it on a different scale; no sports cars, but with big screen tvs, middle class cars etc. You think most people buy the latest 3d tv because they want to watch stuff in 3d? Some people probably do, most just want to have something more than others.

rlpb 15y ago

Lose your ego. Develop a genuine interest in other people. If you aren't interested in anyone else, then what reason do they have to care about you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influence_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influenc...

geoka9 15y ago
Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked? I fail to see any other legitimate use of it.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  Then your curiosity, your imagination or both have failed to engage. I got a job through Twitter once, along with countless examples of professional and personal advice, guidance and encouragement. I can easily communicate with far-flung friends without the freighted expectations of long-form letters. I can maintain a professional network and stay up to date on new technologies and open source code. It's a decent chunk of why I have my career as it currently exists, if I'm to be honest.
  - geoka9 15y ago
    Fair enough. I guess I just don't dig communicating via SMS-style messages. EDIT: And, having pondered that some more, it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest. No, I certainly don't dig it. Although I can imagine following tweets of a person I'm really interested in, but that would only be 2 or 3 people--close people like girlfriend and relatives.
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      > it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest. It needn't be even remotely like that. You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why. It's okay to not know about some things. And it's okay to not have your curiosity draw you to certain things. But when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about, why go on asserting that ignorance as fact instead of asking questions and learning more? Why enshrine your ignorance in lengthy words, insisting others take a bite? Here's what it's most like, for me: IRC. Where you're the bouncer and the channel contains whomever you'd like. The messages are brief but that's their only resemblance to SMS. 140 characters is more than ample to share thoughts or directions toward interesting content. There's plenty of communication, if you choose to use it that way.

RegEx 15y ago

Social media gurus preach brand awareness and engagement, but the truth is most people care more about the actions of a common squirrel than you. http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel

zdw 15y ago

If your number of followers/friends/fans on Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. is how you measure your self worth, you might want to readjust your values. HN Karma is a much better method. :P

whazzmaster 15y ago

I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting. Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the twitterverse at-large?

corin_ 15y ago

If you only want to be on twitter for your ego and you don't actually have the ability to massage that ego, then who honestly cares. The three suggestions in this post... just no. I get why people follow celebrities, I don't want to myself, but many people do so fair enough. But follow random people, and get random people to follow me? Twitter is a communication tool, just like email, Skype, whatever. It's quite possible for it to be useful with the people you actually know, you don't have to use it as service for finding people you don't know to make yourself look popular.

diego 15y ago
You're missing the point. The most value I get from Twitter comes from interacting with other people, especially in serendipitous ways. It's not about being followed by random people at all; it's about following (and being followed by) people with whom you could have interesting conversations.
- spooneybarger 15y ago
  So you want a synchronous relationship in an async medium?

chmike 15y ago

Just subscribed a short time ago and didn't have the same experience. I started following some interesting people, from my point of view, and I immediately got followers. I suspect that some people follow new subscribers with similar interests so that they follow back expecting the new subscriber to see who they are. The other thing I did was to tweet a private message to some known person who answered me. So this might have caught some attention too if it was seen by others. Since one has to follow both people involved in a "private" communication to see the exchange, this could motivate people to follow me.

darksaga 15y ago
I've been on Twitter since the beginning and have had the same experience. Start following some people, post some interesting things and you'll get followers. Another way to get followers is to either pimp a product or complain about a product. More often than not, you'll get some followers and you might get a response. Either way, I've loved it. It's very stream of conscious and a great sounding board for me.

jrmg 15y ago

How about following people you actually know, and then using twitter as a communication medium?

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Yuuuup. Twitter is just a communication mechanism. If you're not leveraging synergies and monetizing your social media with new configurations of value that's not a problem in the least. Twitter is not some multi-level marketing scam that you need to exploit. It's a way to keep up with people you like or people you are interested in, famous or not.
- brad22 15y ago
  better luck next time

p4bl0 15y ago

Twitter isn't about having the maximum number of followers. It's just another way of communicating and get news and updates from people / groups / whatever more instantly. If you find it painful to not have 180k followoers then you're kind of a looser. Sorry to say it like this. But this kind of attitude lead people to mass-follow anyone to have some follow-back and that's creating spam and it's kind of borring for normal-non-followers-needy twitter users.

diego 15y ago
There's a difference between having 180k followers and having 0. Having 0 is painful because you tweet into nothingness. My observation comes from trying to get many of my friends started with Twitter, only to see that their tweets get lots in the continuously-scrolling timelines of the five of us who follow them back to get them started.
- p4bl0 15y ago
  No you don't tweet into nothingness: your feed is public which means that you can for instance show your last tweet on your blog/homepage/... and use twitter as a quick update tool for visitor of your blog/site/... Also, you can use hashtags to join a conversation (this is done better with groups in status.net). In the same time start to follow people who say things that interest you (news, links, personal update, event coverage...). If you're not interested in any of the use cases above, then why start using twitter at all?
  - diego 15y ago
    First off, no reason to downvote me because you disagreed with my comment. My point is that if Twitter is trying to get past the point of people who do the things you say (savvy social media people) and cross into the Facebook mainstream, they need to give people easy ways to be heard. My post is from the point of view of the company, not the potential users. Why start using Twitter at all is exactly right, and a problem for Twitter.
    - 15y ago

benjash 15y ago

Like all social media, its no fun if you have no friends.

antihero 15y ago

Why would people follow someone that doesn't actually exist? Twitter is for people you already know, people they know, and then people that take your interest along the way. It builds on existing friendships, as opposed to starting with nothing. You might get lucky if you say good things to the right people, but if you have no friends in real life, don't expect to be Mr. Popular on Twitter.

serichsen 15y ago

This is a matter of expectations. What did you expect? I opened a twitter account when I noticed some people who had interesting things to say and who did this on twitter. My expectation was a little "news" feed. Then, while I was at it, I tweeted some things of my own, mostly expressions of political opinion and insights. I also retweeted some things I found interesting and worthy of attention. Suddenly, I had 3 followers. I did not expect that, but I thought that it was great that someone was listening to me. That did not change my expectations nor my behaviour. Follower count? Who cares? I have 12 followers. Among them are a handful of people that I respect very much, and I feel quite honoured that they are willing to listen to what I say. This feels much more important to me than 100000 people following some sort of lolcats.

drivebyacct2 15y ago

So people still don't understand Twitter after all this time huh?

jsavimbi 15y ago
It never gets old reading comments, or in this case a whole blog post coming from people who are unable to grasp how Twitter is actually one thing but is repurposed for a myriad of others, much to the enjoyment of many of its users.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  I just don't understand the blog post anyway. "It's dumb to try to rack up followers just for a number" right after "I can't get any followers". Find a way to use Twitter to get content from people you like. My Twitter is a combination of an RSS reader and a way for my friends to share quick thoughts or links. There is overlap with Facebook and overlap with Google Reader, but there is lots of content that I get from Twitter or discover on Twitter... that I can't find elsewhere. I feel like if people spent more time following people they knew or developers they like or project/product managers, etc, they would actually see the value in Twitter, rather than trying to take this ivory tower approach.
  - geoka9 15y ago
    I think I now know what my problem with Twitter is. I'd like to follow some developers I like, but I just don't feel like reading about their personal life or random thoughts. And this seems to be a big part of any personal Twitter stream.
    - flamingbuffalo 15y ago
      that's the benefit of being able to quickly (and silently) unfollow someone. Personally, I use a "3 tweets in a row that are annoying = unfollow" rule. It works well for me. And anyways, you'll often be surprised at how someone you respect professionally can be ver entertaining in their personal life.

BenSS 15y ago

I never cared much about my 'follower count', yet I've had some fantastic conversations and gained a lot of valuable info via Twitter. I've got barely over 100 followers, and a small proportion of them are people I know in real life. Maybe twitter should be promoting the use of hashtag topics more, since that's where I've found new people to follow and gotten followers by contributing.

cruise02 15y ago

Are you really complaining that Twitter is too hard? It's taken me a couple of years, but I've accumulated over a thousand followers on Twitter. Some of those came through my blog, but most came through Stack Overflow where I'm a moderator and active contributor. The point is that you have to actually do something to make people want to follow you. Why would people give you their attention (even micro slices of their attention) otherwise? Also: > I don't want Twitter to start looking into my Gmail and follow people who are on Twitter. seems at odds with: > This is why you should be very afraid of Google+, they give people an instant audience. That's very powerful.

openbear 15y ago

Twitter is NOT about mindlessly collecting a vast number of followers ... unless you're a CEO trying to market your various companies. Seriously folks, look at the author / submitter ... "CEO of Flaptor, maker of IndexTank (indextank.com) Hounder (hounder.org) and Trendistic (trendistic.com) among other things." ... this is the blog of a CEO who is trying to build a reputation and / or brand awareness. Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind the intent of the author when reading the OP. "First, let's admit that part of what makes Twitter interesting is egos and follower counts. There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500. When you join Twitter you are the bottom bitch." I guess this is how folks with something to sell see Twitter. It's not how anyone else I know who uses Twitter socially (as opposed to as a marketing tool) see Twitter.

Helianthus 15y ago
>There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500. There is something about this attitude that is genuinely evil.

theflyingswami 15y ago

I'm with the author of the article on this one. Call me egotistical all you want but yeah, I tried Twitter for a few days and got really bored with it. The author's complaints basically mirror my short Twitter experience. If I tweet something and literally have 2 or 3 followers who will see it, why not just send an Sms? Pointless. So, I need a larger group of followers, no? But what motive does Twitter have to get me to bust ass and try to build a follower base? None. I already took the time to build a friend base some other social network and I'm in no mood to start that process again. As a means of getting up-to-the-minute news and information,Twitter excels. But yeah, count me out.

arthurgibson 15y ago

If you're not famous, getting a reservation is painful...this is the truth for a ton of things. Stoking the fire never hurts. Funny thing I tweeted at this guy and got no response.

cdr 15y ago

I have zero followers (I only really use it to respond to other people), and Twitter is incredibly useful to me. It lets me easily and naturally interact with well known/popular people I otherwise wouldn't normally have any reason to interact with.

deleted 15y ago

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aperrien 15y ago

I posted this in the article itself, and I think it's relevant here: The concept of location-based communications is a very powerful one. Imagine that you were new to an area, and you wanted to meet locals with similar interests. You should be able to create a tag about something that interests you, and broadcast it out to people within, say, 1-2 miles and invite like minded people out to coffee, or a movie, or some sort of similar event. This provides a way to create real-life followers and build interests off of that. If nothing else, I my end up writing something to do this myself... I've wanted an app like this for a while now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to build it on Google+ when their API comes out.

v21 15y ago

If you don't have friends to talk to and to listen to on a social media service, don't be on that social media service.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

I'm not famous, and twitter is awesome. I use it to keep up with my friends and it works fantastically well. If you don't have friends who use twitter or don't have friends maybe your experience would be different.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could be used to filter out who you interact with. The slider would set the popularity threshold. You may prefer your account to interact with accounts that have roughly the same number of followers as yours, with roughly the same number of followers and the same karma. In this system, following someone is no longer a binary proposition: you follow someone at a given threshold. If your threshold is set below the number of followers of the account, you don't see their tweets, and they don't get to count you among their followers. As you move the slider, your view of Twitter changes to match the threshold: accounts you may have followed at the higher threshold drop off or become visible as you change settings. Why do this? Well, if you're a new user, you may be tired of contributing to someone else's power-law distribution. Why should you enable the rich to get richer? Why not join a system where you can interact with other users at comparable levels? Twitter is losing the Johnny-come-lately's anyway. So there is an opportunity to encourage interactions that go beyond the discouraging power-law phenomena in which a few users have most of the followers. As Satan said, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." A follower threshold feature could enable this, and it might generate interesting analytics.

petercooper 15y ago

No more painful than starting a blog, a podcast, or even a GitHub account. You have to actually produce stuff to get attention in any case.

unkoman 15y ago

Why do you even want followers? What makes you so interesting?

dr_ 15y ago

Tell that to the teenage kids who were using twitter to communicate to people that they were under assault. They were able to do it discreetly, without having to vocalize themselves by a phone call. Twitter has it's usefulness, but not everyone has realized it just yet. I hope that changes - maybe the upcoming integration with iOS will allow it to. Depending on how far it's integrated, it can provide developers some amazing tools to work with.

socialmediaking 15y ago

Get an autofollow/unfollow program which just follows people based on keyword, followers list, following list, etc. You put a couple of interesting tweets, and interesting username, and a background and profile image. It follows those people, see who follows back and then after a certain amount of time unfollows the ones who don't (or everyone) pretty easy way to get a lot of people seeing your tweets.

radarsat1 15y ago

> Help me find newbies like me, who want to follow and be followed! This is otherwise know as a "business opportunity".

brianwillis 15y ago

I thought this article would be about how hard it is to get a decent Twitter username now that spammers have taken up so many of them. That was my biggest challenge, but Twitter doesn't really seem to care about the problem.

wtn 15y ago
They would rather pretend to have 400 000 000 users than eliminate the crap accounts.

deleted 15y ago

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sacrilicious 15y ago

As a premise for a blog post this isn't a particularly veiled attempt at armchair quarterbacking twitter, and closing with 'k, now go follow me everybody!' clangs instead of adding to the argument. I guess people who use this reasoning as their entire purpose for interacting online turn me off to the point that I don't anticipate ever joining Facebook, and still find very little compelling about G+. People post to G+'s generic-looking interface instead of blogging, and get piled on with comments, losing both personality and clarity in contrast to something like Tumblr or traditional blogging. Twitter and Tumblr are two great tastes that taste great together, however you want to utilize them in my opinion.

prawn 15y ago

Even as a marketing tool (and the same applies with a blog), you cannot expect an instant return. You start with zero followers just like a blog starts with few readers. You don't give up just because no one's listening, you create a bit of history by effectively loss-leading - writing content that no one will initially see and contributing to what you might want Twitter to be. Over time, through search, links from your blog and interacting with other Twitter users, you will build up some interaction and (if that's what you're there for) influence. I suppose the impatience and expectations of new users are that challenge for Twitter, though it'd be nice to see more people realise this for themselves rather than wait to have it solved for them.

notatoad 15y ago

if you don't have anybody who wants to follow you, and you don't particularly want to follow anybody, then yes i suppose joining twitter might be a confusing process. but that's because twitter isn't suited to you. tailoring a social web service towards antisocial people is probably not a good business strategy.