A year ago, I urged Twitter to fix its arbitrary and stupid limit on accounts you can follow.
Here’s how annoying that limit is: That post is now my second most-read post, with more than 19,000 views. Day after day, nearly a hundred people come to my post, invariably from Google, looking for help with Twitter’s follower limit (97 came on Thursday, 83 on Friday).
Twitter allows anyone to follow up to 2,000 other accounts (although you can’t follow more than 1,000 in a day). I think it’s good for Twitter to have some measures to curb excessive following. It limits what spammers can do. But it’s ridiculous that Twitter hasn’t developed a way for an account to prove it’s legitimate and then continue adding followers.
The limit is not a problem for me. If you have more followers than the number you follow, you’re fine. I have more than five times as many followers as I follow, so I have well over 2,000 followers and have never hit the limit. (I’m trying to trim my follower list, just to lighten my timeline; please don’t take it personally if I drop you).
But for many journalists, trying to follow people in their communities, most of them will follow you back, but some won’t, and at some point you can end up following more accounts than follow you. Once you hit 2,000, the number of accounts you can follow is limited by a secret formula. Here’s how Twitter explains it: “This number is different for each account and is based on your ratio of followers to following; this ratio is not published.”
I touched base with some of the journalists who called the problem to my attention last year, and a couple reported they are managing to follow new people by culling the herd of those that aren’t as useful. One still hits the limit occasionally, the other hasn’t had a problem for a while. But it’s absolutely ridiculous that working journalists seeking to use Twitter effectively have to deal with this foolish limit. (I won’t repeat my tips here, but last year’s post had tips for using Twitter effectively in spite of the limit.)
Twitter has been quite successful with lousy customer service. I don’t expect them to change. I invited comment from some Twitter staffers I know and will add the comments if they respond.) The latest figure I’ve seen for active users is 241 million, so the thousands of people who’ve found my post in frustration are not even one-hundredth of 1 percent of Twitter’s total active users. The company probably sees this as a minuscule problem, so I expect people to continue visiting last year’s post.
But here’s my question: Why would a product limit its use by people who find it useful?
Hi Steve~ I find people who drop followers to “streamline their timeline” much more annoying than twitter follow limits. I use lists to categorize content into manageable mini time lines and no followers need be lost. I run 4-6 lists all the time without the information becoming unmanageable.
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Everyone should be free to use Twitter as they please. No reason to be annoyed if someone would rather follow you in a list than in the timeline. Or if they stop following.
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You’re right, Steve.
I ran into the problem years ago, and at that time, was able to laugh it off, admitting that I find people more interesting than they find me.
Journalists and many non-journalists can have very legitimate reasons to follow a large number of accounts, and 2,000 seems like a totally arbitrary and outdated cap.
Without that limit, though, what approach should Twitter take to combat spam accounts who follow a seemingly indiscriminate number of accounts in the hopes of getting some to follow them back?
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I agree with a limit to prevent the spammers. And, in fact, I’d favor a lower limit, maybe 1,000. Then when you hit the limit, Twitter could easily program an algorithm to analyze your account’s interaction. If other accounts are replying to you, retweeting you, favoriting you, etc., you’re whitelisted and continue adding followers. Probably no need for human involvement and difficult to game or not worth the trouble.
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The social media “dictators” depend on our masses building social networks and we the masses depend on the networks to give us the tools of connectivity among each other it is naturally wrong to have all of us under the umbrella of mass doing the mass efforts to co create this structure and at the same time being subjected to any quantifiable limitation in contrast to unlimited number
of all sum of people following the agenda
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I agree, im extremely annoyed by this. I have a competition only account on twitter, so you can imagine how annoyed i am.
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