This is an open letter to Twitter staff.
Please, dear Twitter programmers, make something to avoid people following thousands and thousands of people just to make a few of them to follow him/her back and make spam…
I call this people Gigafollowers and I think I have a method to stop them: implementing “following ratios”.
Let’s say you have 40 followers and you are following 50 people, this is an average Twitter user, but, if you have 30 followers and you’re following 20k people… obviously, you’re a spammer.
So, I would handle this with a simple formula:
number of people allowed to follow = people following me * N
Where N is a fair number to multiply or power the number of people following myself. This way a Gigafollower has to have more people following him/her to continue spamming, and at least, they will be a bit more screwed.
Julio 11, 2008 a las 9:38 am
I agree – increasingly people are automating the follow process using the public timeline. It would be nice to see this practice controlled in some way – I can imagine as Twitter grows the spam issue will too.
Occasionally the practice is legitimate: for example I use a third party service which follows me in order to analyse my tweets. This third party service follows thousands of people, but isn’t followed as it’s a (legitimate) robot. Perhaps Twitter could “accredit” them?
There would have to be a slight modification to your formula for new users – I might want to follow 30 or 40 people, but I wouldn’t have any followers myself.