I have been thinking of unfollowing some people on Twitter but I haven’t got the time to filter through the list of people I’m following. I have to say I rarely ever unfollow someone on Twitter unless they are outright spammers. However, some people are really getting on my nerves these days and here’s why:
Twitter is not your MSN
Twitter is not another variation of MSN and I hope some people will stop treating it like one. I do not mind discussions, meaningful or random conversations but just not the ones like the above. I see those every single day on my timeline from the same group of people. If they wish to ask “How are you?” to the same person every day, please add him or her on MSN instead of flooding my timeline with their tweets.
I do not understand why it is necessary to reply to nearly every single tweet on their timeline with replies like Wow, I see or just a smiley face. Sorry but I’ve to say that it’s extremely annoying. If they do not have any constructive comments or additional things to add on or reply to, please do not reply then. Personally I feel that this is a lot more irritating than advertising tweets, at least most tweet ads do not fill up my entire timeline all at one time.
Try not to flood me with contest tweets at one shot
All the genuine tweets are being buried by theirs. I did not even have time to read through the latest tweets on my list before everything is pushed off by the “ABC company is giving away …” tweets. Occasional contest tweets are totally fine with me. The sad thing is, some people prefer to tweet the maximum number of entries allowed in a contest at one go just in case they forgot to do it later. If the contest has a limit of 20 entries per day, they will tweet 20 times all at once. How about an entry per hour instead? There is not much I can do besides unfollowing the person. I used to filter out the hashtag for some contest with Destroy Twitter but I would have to add a new hashtag everytime such a contest starts.
Formspring tweets can be too much sometimes
In case there are people who aren’t aware of what Formspring is, it’s a website that enables you to set up a page to allow people to ask you questions, sort of like an FAQ page.
Most people turned on the feature of sending answered questions to their Twitter account. It’s not a problem until they start answering 10 to 20 questions at a time. It’s the same logic as the contest tweets. Let’s be frank, it is logical for them to answer all the questions when they login. I would do the same too but do they have to linked their account to Twitter? Couldn’t they picked and just tweet the most important or interesting question for the day manually? Some of their followers like me won’t be interested in reading all the questions and answers but rather just the interesting ones. Some may feel that 8 tweets isn’t a large number but if 5 persons are doing it, there will be about 40 Formspring tweets on my timeline out of 100 recent tweets for example.
So, that’s my list. What about yours?
3 March, 2010 at 1:36 am
WOW, I love your website, especially layout. It’s sooo cute. I’m still learning how to make cool layouts like yours, hope I get better at it soon…. (*SIGH)
2 March, 2010 at 10:29 am
Hello, thanks for the compliment!
I think I still need a lot of practice in taking photos though!
If I’m honest, I’m still a little confused with this whole Twitter thing lol. Most of my friends don’t use it, so I just use it to update as if it were my Facebook status. I don’t think I have come across really long and annoying conversations like that though xD But then again I don’t use it that much!
1 March, 2010 at 4:25 pm
While I have not come across people spamming Twitter using FormSpring, I have seen countless number of cases where people actually spam their very unfortunate followers with garbage just because they were desperate to win some online giveaway contest. I condone such behaviour because not only does it overload the Twitter server with tweets that are of little value to other users, it also forces the server to push the same useless tweets to all his/her followers (therefore overloading the server). It is these kind of irresponsible tweeting that summons the fail whale once in a while, but I’m glad that it’s a thing of the past.
I don’t mind if people engage in meaningful and helpful conversation on Twitter via @reply, there is a thin line being a short, brief chat and spammy chat as well. Usually when I feel that the conversation is getting longer, I will take the initiate to move to direct messages instead by sending my friend a DM after his/her last @reply. Most of the time they’ll get the hint and move on to DM chat instead
1 March, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Some people don’t really care if they are spamming their followers. On the other hand, some don’t really know what’s spammy and what’s not. We may feel that they are spamming our timeline with their tweets but they don’t feel the same. I don’t know to make them understand. It’s not like I can tweet them a message like “Please read this post” like what Jenny has suggested, right? That would be too obvious.
1 March, 2010 at 7:11 am
i totally agree with that.. some people are just chatting in their twitter account.. lol and know what? i unfollowed other people added on my following list.. lol now, im just following 16 people.. haha
28 February, 2010 at 10:22 pm
I can relate with everything you posted, Dayna! I hate it when people talk nonsense on my twitter which is why I unfollow some of them. It’s pretty annoying especially if they’re the same people every single day and they keep on flooding the timeline with nonsense stuff :\ Ugh.