Mar 23, 2009
A list of things that will get you removed from my Twitter list
Look, I don’t want to tell anyone how Twitter should be used – each to their own; it’s a big web and there’s room for lots of different experiences, so please yourself and all that.
However, that being said, it’s my web experience as well, so as a point of reference, it may be worth mentioning that there are a few things/habits/behaviours on Twitter which are pretty much guaranteed to make me unfollow you – temporarily or permanently – and that’s my right, too.
UPDATE, because people keep reading and linking to this as RULES FOR HOW TO USE TWITTER: These are not rules for how to use Twitter. Use it however you want. This is simply a list of habits that bother me – in varying amounts and at various times – when other people do them a lot. This is a list of things that might make me switch off from following someone, just as certain formats or personalities on the television bother me and make me more likely to switch off from watching.
You may not agree. You don’t have to agree. You don’t even have to stop doing them. If you like doing any of the below, or think they’re completely fine to do, then great; please carry on. No-one’s judging you, and most of all, no-one’s telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. Use Twitter however you want.
(For the record, I don’t much like celery, either. If you do like it, then great. I’m not judging you on your celery consumption, I don’t think you’re a horrible, person, or an idiot, and I certainly wouldn’t dream of stopping you eating crunchy vegetables, because that would be weird and inappropriate. But if you invite me over for dinner, and tell me you’re going to be serving celery stew followed by celery pate with a celery gravy, you’ll understand if I don’t eat much, or choose not to come, or maybe just meet you for drinks later, yes?)
- Endless retweeting without adding any value or original thought in between. Or at all. If you retweet more than once a day, especially from the same source(s), I’ll likely dump you and follow them instead. NB, this is even more irritating when I already follow the person you’re retweeting.
- Posting link after link after link even if they’re to really interesting articles and sites and things you’ve spotted on the web. I appreciate that this is a retro thing to say these days, but: Get a blog.
- Saying good morning, hello, good night to your followers. This is not your personal radio show. This is not an AOL chatroom from 1995. We’ll know when you’ve woken up, because you’ll start twittering. We’ll know when you’ve gone up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire because you’ll have gone quiet, or possibly will have indicated something circumstantially relevant before you went (e.g. “Bugger this, there’s nothing on television: I’m going to bed”). Even though your mother brought you up well and it’s good manners generally, there really is no need to say “good night”. Except if you’re @JohnBoyWalton.
- Going to an event and liveblogging it via Twitter. Does what you’re communicating need to be communicated to this group of people, immediately? If not, then you could probably use a blog, and twitter once to say you’re covering it over there. NB This behaviour marks an interesting shift in people using Twitter as communication medium with known group to people using it as a microblog, so I see why it’s increasingly happening – but it’s infernally spammy if you’re not interested.
- Using it to organise an event or rendezvous with other people who happen to be in your twitter list. Use email. Use direct messages. Use the telephone. Or invite everyone. But using a public medium for a private conversation is most vexatious and supererogatory.
- Flooding the screen by updating 84 times in rapid succession. This matters, when you’re abroad and paying for every bit of data downloaded. A stream-hog is like a roadhog: inconsiderate and difficult to ignore.
- Referring to people as “tweeple” or “tweeps”, questions as “twestions” or “twask”, adding someone to your list as a “twadd”, use of “tweet” or any other kind of meaningless derivative which is wholly unnecessary and infantile. People are still people, even if they’re on twitter. Questions are still questions. I realise that language evolves and new words are constantly being coined, but this stuff just makes me want to tweam and tweam and tweam until I’m twick.
Also, there are four things (features?) I’d dearly love to see implemented somewhere, which would help to manage some of the above and some additional twirratations (gah! I’m doing it now!):
- When someone (public) replies to my (private) Twitter stream, please don’t show it in the search, dearest darling Twitter.
- Let me put people on pause, occasionally – or rate limit them. Sometimes you need a holiday from your friends.
- If I’m private, let me shout (public message) as well as talk to people I know. Or if I’m public, let me whisper (to an identified group of followers). Call it semi public/semi private.
- Let me ignore (or opt into) following particular hashtags. If someone twitters something including “#guardiancommunity”, I want to know about it, even if I’m not following them – let it break through into my consciousness. On the other hand, even if my closest friends twitter using a hashtag like “#spurs” don’t show it to me. I love them dearly, and value their friendship, but I’m just not interested in the topic.
I’ve touched on some of this stuff before, as Twitter has evolved over the last three years or so:
- Breaking the news: Dear Twitter friend
- Twitter ye not: further thoughts on an evolving medium
- Twit by name
- Musings on Twitter
- The seven deadly sins of Twitter
Interesting (to me at least) to note how the “sins” in the latter link there have mostly been resolved by people adapting to the tool, but that new behaviours and rather annoying tics have taken their place (see above).
Incidentally, you can find my public twitter stream at twitter.com/megpickard. I have a private one, too – but that’s mostly for people I know in person, have ranted with in pubs, and for whom the conversation is off-the-record. It’s never that juicy, though. (Sorry).
Those are all great suggestions; and I definitely share your horror at the twabundance of meaningless tweologisms… exasperating in the extreme!
Every now and then I have to go through my follow list and mercilessly cull the uninteresting people. I have no qualms about unfollowing a friend in favour of a complete stranger who just happens to be funnier. It’s the only way I can keep Twitter fun.
It’s okay, we’re all back from Austin now.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
YES!!!
Would you mind awfully if I put you forward to be Queen of the Internets?
Swearing, emotweets/moaning and gnomic non-sequiturs still ok though?
Not just OK: actively encouraged.
Wish #4: if you use TweetDeck, you can subscribe to such updates and have them appear in a column alongside your stream, replies and direct messages in real time.
The rest: I agree.
Amazing!
Every time I hear somebody say “tweeple” a small part of me dies. The same goes for “tweet-up” I will never, EVER attend a tweet-up. WHY CAN’T YOU GUYS TALK LIKE GROWN-UPS!
@Mark Howells-Mead, I agree. I find Tweetdeck incredibly useful for topic searches, and also # elimination. But I do think that Twitter should have these features *built in*: right now it’s still a pile of unedited noise.
@Meg, number 3 grates me more than I dare to say in public (or, indeed, on Twitter). Grr.
I agree with all of them except the live-commentary. I do think if it’s used it should be done sparingly, and not merely as a running commentary.
There’s something in a few weeks from which I’m thinking of sending updates, over the course of about 5 hours.
I want to send quick instant impressionist off-the-cuff views; the next day I will write a more considered review as a blogpost, but that might not be until 24 hours after the event.
If people following me aren’t interested, that’s unfortunate, but it will be just five hours, and I don’t think any of us is interested in 100% of the output of people we read on Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc
Hear hear, dear Meg! I would love to have opted out of #sxbloodysw last week :)
I’ve been guilty of #4 (if watching the Brit Awards 2007 on telly counts as “attending”) and #5 (the members of our weekly pub quiz team are all on Twitter, and sometimes one of us will mention it in passing, and the @replies just follow on from that; I’m just sayin’, not excusin’!)
I do think everyone should be allowed a very occasional, limited time-span waiver of #4, if a sufficiently high number of their followers are likely to be interested in the event.
#2 doesn’t bother me at all. It self-selects. Some of the people I follow post loads of links – but from my perspective they’re good, interesting links, and Twitter is a convenient way of accessing them. I don’t follow people whose tweets don’t interest me, regardless of what percentage of those tweets are links. (NB For those of us with no option but web-only, Tweetree helpfully expands most links, allowing you to judge whether or not they’re worth clicking.)
People who use Twitter as a duplicate RSS feed are still my main source of irritation, but I’ve unfollowed most of them now!
Tweetdeck isn’t an option for *cough* 38 hours of the week *cough* – and I suspect this is the case for a lot of office-based people – so Tweetdeck-based work-arounds are off the agenda.
I too have been guilty of #4, but for things of wide general interest/snark ( Oscars). I do try to limit myself. I’m quite looking forward to reading Twitter during the Eurovision Song Contest and I don’t even have a horse in that race.
So far,the people I follow all have really interesting links, although there’s one, who I followed out of novelty and now out of general curiosity who really fills up the screen. I just can’t bring myself to block him…..yet.
One minor reservation, re #4: “A Tweet” is the noun for a single Twitter update, surely? Mind you, “update” is only one more character.
AuntieMabel – you’re right. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Ha ha!
I can so relate. Or could, when I still used Twitter. What amuses me even more is that I must get at least three or four notifications from Twitter a day telling me so and so is following my feed. Have no idea, haven’t used it in weeks. Do people actually go around following, even there is nothing to follow? Ridiculous. Loved your post. Won’t be following your twitter feed ;p
I was just thinking about your recommendation number 3 the other day. Mind you, you can’t even message a selected (ad hoc) group of people on facebook, can you? If you can do it within email, you’d think you’d be able to do it within these social sites.
[...] Clarification of the post about things that will get you bumped from my Twitter list The other day, I posted a list of things that will get you removed from my Twitter list. [...]
[...] it’s that Twitter post. [...]
Yes to 2,3,5 and 6!!!!
Or the followfriday fanatics who post every single one of their friends/followers in a great long series of tweets, never giving a reason why they would be interesting. Their tweeting for the day is a list of lists. You almost feel guilty for removing them from your follow list when they’ve just recommended you… Almost.
Interesting post, and with some of it I agree. However, having checked out your timeline, I find commentary on the farts at King’s Cross being sulfuric, a request for smoothies because you were ill, albeit cleverly worded, and a comment that you were compiling a big list, of what we do not know.
Seems like you don’t follow all of your own advice! ;-)
Social media is supposed to be social, and so some of what you rail against is really only irritating when it gets extreme, in my opinion. Even some of the Twitter vocabulary doesn’t seem to me all that bothersome.
Isn’t it supposed to be fun?
What’s wrong with saying good morning, good afternoon, good night, good day to someone you are chatting with?
This is why Twitter should have advanced filtering built in.
@Sue – I absolutely make no claim to be the perfect Twitterer!
@Angel – I hink that’s where we differ: I don’t use it as chat. I think about it as parallel streams. You tune in and out when you can.
“When someone (public) replies to my (private) Twitter stream, please don’t show it in the search, dearest darling Twitter.”
This has been nagging gently at me… isn’t that a hacky technical solution to a social problem — people should learn that messages sent by someone whose twitters are private should remain private. In the same way that people know that an email sent to an individual, or a private mailing list, shouldn’t be forwarded to everyone they know.
The difficulty with fixing this social problem is that, as far as I know, most Twitter clients don’t make it obvious whether a particular message is sent from someone whose stream is private or not. So it’s very easy to forget that out of all these identical looking messages, a few of them are only sent to a few friends, and not broadcast to the world.
So there is a technical solution which would encourage the social solution — have clients make it obvious which messages should remain private and thus not re-tweeted.
Okay, I violate several of these rules–I say good morning, I live-Tweet events, I go to TweetUps but they are public events–but a) you don’t follow me and b) I have my own list of things that will get you unfollowed (there is a bit of overlap).
Like you said, to each her own.
DM (Direct Messaging)is everyone’s friend.
Multiple accounts are good too. Use hootsuite.com to manage the multiple accounts.
TweetDeck is fantastic! I’ve limited automatic up dates to 10 or 12 minutes (5-6 times an hour). Big chunks of messages help you decide if a person is a keeper or not.
Good suggestions, esp. the shout and whisper concepts.
I’m getting hammered at the moment by several on my feed doing #4, and one of them doing #6. Very frustrating…
Having the ability to ignore certain hashtags would be ideal.
Great site btw. Read a few of your articles last night & have already referred a couple of friends to them.
They really should find a way to opt in and out of trends and hashtags. That’d be brilliant!
If I hadn’t worked online for so long I wouldn’t know why this post had created such a stir but that’s the interwubs for you… Another day another misunderstanding! Hope it has all died down now!