Saturday, January 28, 2012

To follow or not

I've my various reasons for following, not following, or stopped following (replace "following" with "to circles" or "friended" where applicable). As much as I like to follow you back, I don't want my timeline to be filled with junk too. What is listed here mostly applies to twitter.

Reasons for following:

  1. You are already being followed by several people I'm already following and possibly receiving mentions from the said person regularly
  2. Your tweets are interesting
  3. Out of curisosity
Reasons for not following:
  1. Tweets are mostly in a language that I don't understand
  2. Too much links, including "I favourited a Youtube video" or "MyAnimeList updated".
  3. Protected account, so I don't know what you are tweeting about (protected accounts you see in my following list were not protected at the time I followed them)
  4. Not interested / Never seen you before
  5. Too many retweets
  6. Boring tweets
  7. Ugly profile and/or display image (if viewing via the PC web version at that time)
  8. Has a #teamfollowback hashtag somewhere
  9. Number of followers is more than several thousand
  10. (For accounts of well-known people) Not from a personal point of view
  11. Adopting a wait-and-see approach if not having the same interest or not having anyone I'm following following them too.
Reasons for unfollowing:
  1. Tweet too frequently and clogging up my timeline, especially when I'm following a lot of people.
  2. Became uninterested. "Protected" accounts are not excluded.
  3. Spamming my timeline with rubbish at the time I saw you doing it. This includes replies to those that we both follow.
  4. Thanking all followers individually for following and not placing the username first. One right after the other for countless times. (Example)
  5. Not on good terms (They usually unfollow me first.)
  6. Tweets too infrequently (eg. 5 tweets a month), or the last one was a long time ago
  7. Changes to a display image (and maybe display name too) to something I find disturbing
Reasons for blocking:
  1. Obvious spammer (and gets reported too)
  2. Corporate accounts following me based on what I said recently
  3. Accidentally did so