Yesterday, on Twitter, Loic Le Meur decided to unfollow everyone he was following. Interestingly, he kept all his followers though.
Then today, Jason Calacanis has done the same thing – kept all his followers, but unfollowed them all!
This has to be seen as a crazy business move for Loic, as the producer of twhirl – a tool for managing your twitter account! Surely, having to dump those he followed because he could not keep up is hardly an endorsement of his software?
Jason Calacanis making this move is far less surprising. He has a hardcore of followers, who will follow him regardless of what he does.
Twitter unfollow trend
I might be wrong, but I think more highly-followed Twitter users will copy what Loic and Jason have done. Loic seems to have set a trend and made it OK for “Twitter celebrities” to delete all those they follow, whilst holding onto their ‘followers’ so they can broadcast to them.
What do you think?
.
I’m betting some people who THINK they’re important will try this and suffer the consequences – in other words, they’ll lose their followers, because word will get out and RT’s will be going around like crazy!
Unless you’re very well known, I wouldn’t advise dumping nearly everyone. Pretty rude, actually!
Ross,
I’m not defending Jason, but I think him doing this makes ‘some’ kind of sense. Loic doing it seems really odd though.
It’s not really a conversation then, is it…
It’s the Loic Effect.
Eric,
Nice post – thanks for the link.
Lately, I’ve been getting DMs that I cannot respond to, since I’m not being followed. To me that says, “I deserve privacy because I’m important but you don’t loser.” I also hate feeling like I’m being barked at…I’m so over the “gurus.” Twitter is about interaction, not announcements.
I believe strongly that if someone follows you, follow back. You are not more important than anyone else, and just because you are following everyone who follows you, does not mean you have to watch the Twitter stream like a hawk, just do your best. Create groups of people using TweetDeck, based around topics/goals, and leave yourself open to the creative minds of the world. My opinion. Have a great week!
I actually were doing the opposite thing after a lot of profiles from eco, green and environment started following me for some reason. I locked my updates and removed followers who weren’t relevant to me.
However it is really bothersome when you follow more than 100 people who keep twittering w/o stop. Twitter starts to loose it’s credibility and you stop reading it.
Every time we turn around someone tries to change how Twitter works. When I first joined it was frowned upon to do much “interaction” because it clogged up the stream. Then it became incredibly rude to not follow or reply to everyone who follows and talks to you. Now they’re trying to make the silent treatment trendy again? I don’t think so. Twitter evolved as it has for a reason–one way convo is dang boring and impersonal. With rare exceptions (like CNN), if you don’t even want to PRETEND you’re interested in what I say, I have no interest in listening.
There’s a lot more noise on Twitter right now, and it’s getting busier by the day.
I really think this will become more ‘normal’ over the coming weeks.
Wonder which ‘tech celebrity’ will be next?
I disagree with that.. If they want to broadcast themselves they can use their blogs.. The goal of the twitter is not this one.. As Michal said, it will not be a conversation..
It doesn’t really make any sense other than as a stunt. And you wouldn’t need to do that if you were not a bit of a “twitter ho” to begin with. Gaining 10,000 or 20,000 or more followers seems more like collecting than it does interacting and communicating. Following just for the sake of following doesn’t make sense to me. I want tweets that are relevant to me, my work or my interests. If someone requests to follow or follows me I go and check their current tweets. If they are inane chatter than I move on.
I agree with TARA and ADRIAN,
It’s not a conversation then if you unfollow people, and I think it takes the SOCIAL out of social media. Would you want to be around someone face-to-face if only they spoke??? Let me tell you, they would have to say pretty interesting stuff ALL THE TIME for me to not walk away from them.
It’s rude, it’s cold, it makes others think they aren’t important when really at the end of the day it’s those people that Jason has unfollowed that keep his business alive. So I think showing a little gratitude is in order and unfollowing people is a lousy way of showing it, I don’t care who you are.
It makes sense to me. Back in my old stockbroker days, yanking out pages of clients from my book was the hardest thing to do. I knew I could make a couple thousand dollars servicing these accounts, but I wanted bigger fish and there are only so many hours you can work.
What’s the difference between being deaf and being shouted at by 50,000 people? In either case you can’t hear anyways so what is the point? If anything these high profile should at least follow a few hundred of their respected colleagues.
Len,
I think with both Loic and Jason, they intend to follow a few hundred people – people they know.
It amazes me how everyone seems to think they know exactly what twitter is for and exactly how it should be used. Screw that.
You don’t.
Is there a definitive purpose as to how paper should be used? Am I allowed to have a 2 way conversation with a friend in the form of a letter, or is it to be used exclusively for tax returns? Can I print my accounting records on it, or can I crumple it up and through it at someone?
At the end of the day, it’s what you make of it. All the etiquette bullshit that’s crept in is simply a result of insecure people without enough friends. So fucking what if you don’t follow me, or, if you do, if I don’t follow back. It’s at _my_ discretion who I choose to follow. If you’re not following me, it doesn’t hinder my ability to send you a message.
Besides, let’s say poor little old you is following @aplusk, but oh shame, he’s not following you back. Your reply to him will still show up in his replies section. If he followed every.single.boring.person.including.you.and.me then he may as well just sit watching the public timeline.
I’m not important, I’m not a celebrity, I’m not even all that interesting, and quite frankly, I’m perfectly happy with having less than 200 followers and following back even less. Truth be told, I’m considering going private so that whiny little gits don’t moan if I don’t follow them back. The only thing that stops me is that my tweets wouldn’t make it to the public timeline, which is something I do find useful from time to time (ie, asking a question to the general public)
Take it, leave it.
I think this is rather selfish and unfriendly. It feels like this attitude says something like: Hey, you are too boring and no use for me, except to listen to what I have to say or sell to you.
I am not even going to check who those people are and I just hope they leave twitter all together. We can have great fun without them.
While I don’t have thousands of followers – I use TweetDeck to create a “special follow group” – (I have other groups like family and friends) the folks I really want to listen to and converse with on a regular basis. Yet, periodically I scroll through all the other folks to check out what is going on the the wide tweet world – and come across lots of interesting stuff. I think it shows bit of arrogance to delete all followers and contrary to the “spirit” of Twitter. It is rude.
I agree with Ross.
This also defeats what Twitter is all about and that is “conversation”, conversation is two way. With only followers Jason Calacanis is now a broadcaster, Talking but not listening.
Personally I can’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing, It would probably be incredibly time consuming and “relatively” unproductive for them to have conversations with everyone of their large number of followers that DM’d them.
I don’t see it as a trend .. but it’s really hard to keep up all the followers tweets but I will follow any useful user who use twitter for giving good informations or tutorials or articles.
thanks for the post Jim
I’ve seen this quite a bit. Company creates a twitter account -> goes to users with the top followers -> follows all of their followers -> waits a couple weeks for people to catch that their company is on twitter -> unfollows everyone. Rinse and repeat and you have a couple thousand of followers.
I side with Scoble in following lots of people for the sake of serendipity. You’re essentially just expanding your universe of potential friends. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to unfollow folks. We’ve all been choosing our own friends since kindergarten, right? Mass unfollowing might just turn out to be a do-over option for people who want to create a more meaningful network. My bet is Loic resumes volume following but is more careful about who he lets in the second time around.
There are three main issues with following a large number of people:
1. You stress out twitter servers. The good folks at Twitter have been asking me to stop following so many people for over six months. The computing power to put together a list of 60k different feeds is large from what i’m told. If everyone did it the system would shut down. This is why Facebook is limiting folks to 5k.
2. twitter clients stop working when you have so many friends. Tweetdeck, etc. basically choke.
3. I can’t really follow anyone too intently. I think the max you can follow is somewhere between 500 and 5k. I’m going to slowly add folks this time around. Essentially folks who i’m in active conversation with I’m adding.
It’s really not personally.
all the best,
jason
I wouldn’t follow such lame people anyway…
Seriously, the result is interesting but the motives are poor.
When “Twitter Celebrity” stands for “anti-social” and “rude”, then please somebody show those freaks the “Delete my account” Button.
i believe you are a bit mistaken here. loic followed everyone because he was being spammed with DMs (not necessarily from friends or his closer network).
his blog post on the issue.
the problem are auto-follows which loic enabled with good intentions.
however, as more and more people are joining twitter its drawbacks are revealed and we will see more abuses. i have recently written about it and asked the question if the concept of microblogging as we know it today is really scalable.
The downfall to this is that they will only see @ replies and DM’s… But maybe that’s all they WANT to see! To each their own! I, on the other hand enjoy viewing the flow of tweets come in from my (just reached 38,000) followers! Random and sometimes mundane as they can be, I often get great ideas and learn lots of new things by just refreshing my Twitter Home page! Obviously I cannot keep up with ALL of the tweets but it does give me the opportunity to observe, and research if someone is discussing an interesting topic!
It’s kindof like having 38,000 televisions in front of me, all showing something different, and if I want to, I can focus in on one if it really interests me!
I wrote a little bit about this, and Loic’s mass unfollow situation, and what sparked his decision on my blog if you’re interested. http://bit.ly/dDfHG
Mike Johnson
@TheBusyBrain
I’ve considered it a few times – not because I think “I’m so awesome” but because some times I feel like maybe I’m ignoring people I have genuine connections with in favor of some I don’t know at all…
But I also learn so much from the people I follow.
It’s a tough call – but for me it’s not about ego so much as about hearing in a crowd.
I just think it’s polite to try to follow back as many followers as you can. I generally avoid adding people who don’t follow back. There are some who offer information that is of interest to me, so the value of what they post is worth a follow with a no follow back.
I agree with Michal – one of the first few commenters. “it’s about the conversation stupid” – tweaking Scoble’s naked conversation premise, and some of the seminal work by “The Clue train manifesto”. Why are these people going backwards? – to mass media communications? Not one human being or one soul is more important than any other!!!!! and therefore those whose fame has inflamed their ego – and think they are better than the rest of us! – are we going to give them that permission and privilege? – I’m not. I prefer to share and talk – I would bow out of the Salesmanship Monologue. But That’s me being a right Weirdo who does not use a Gimp Mask ;0)
I don’t know either one of these folks and probably don’t care to know them. It just seems rude, get off that pedestal. If they don’t want to read about this windbags daily dribble they I don’t want to read about theirs. I know I hate it when I DM someone to comment on their tweet directly and I find they are not following me. There is only one person that I know that has been having trouble following me and he is exempt. I wonder if they comment on comments added to their blog? I doubt it.
I suppose I should have look at the twitter sites first before commenting. I’ll be honest, even with TweetDeck I find it very hard to follow 400 people. I’ve got several core groups that I follow and I jump back to the All Friends column often as well. If jason had close to the number of followers (60,000+), I have no idea how he or anyone else for that matter can follow that many people and conversations and still have time of other social site, websites, main blog, home life and a job!?! I have trouble following friends on Twitter and Plurk, plus my blog, Facebook and Tagged. The last 3 suffer the worst and I end up one month really following Plurk and not so much Twitter, then following Twitter and not so much Plurk all the while my blog, friends on facebook and Tagged wonder where I disappeared too.
Perhaps they have realized they are only human and can really only follow and also get a chance to interact with a core group of folks, friends and people that help them or that they can relate to. So I’m sorry about the windbag comment (I am a windbag as you can see). Just send out a little note saying many thanks for following me and that your only human and can’t follow 60K of different messages. That is what I like about Plurk, the conversation is in one area – hard to follow 400 different conversations over the course of a day.
— Peace
Thanks, Jim. This post was spot-on and a bit more up-to-date than mine. ;-)
Before I accept a new follower, I always check out how much they twitter per day – because too many blocks up your time line and you can miss the really good stuff from friends. I have unfollowed a couple for that reason. Ten messages in a row in ten seconds has to be done by a bot!
I also like to have conversations on line in twitter – which is quite interesting when compared to a chat room – you end up with lots of other stuff in between and that adds to the variety of life.
Some I follow because they are new – could prove to be interesting, so let’s give them a go – some I don’t expect to follow me back – but I want to see what they have to say. To each his own – let’s use Twitter as it suits us – within their rules.
Lesley
See my blog I wrote 3 posts explaining why it was impossible to manage. Nothing personal. No tool will ever allow anyone to read automated robot DMs from many of 23 000 followers
I get anywhere from 100-600+ followers a day. I posted to my blog how to simply get rid of the majority of auto DMs. I get the odd one from a third service I didn’t mention that does not yet have opt-out functionality. But it hardly makes a dent. This doesn’t stop manual dm’s that people send with spam, but I simply unfollow when that happens.
If someone is following me, I’m following back. If someone unfollows me, I’m unfollowing him too. Thats it!
People are free to unfollow – HOWEVER, they should know that many people (myself included) will return the sentiment immediately. There are way too many interesting people on twitter to clog my twitterstream with people who think I’m not worth a 2-way conversation.
With Twitter and similar Social Media applications you make choices, listen for trends and balance protocol. As a fairly new Twitterer with several hundred followers I’m still intent on “reading” and assimilating as many of the Tweets as is reasonable. This is a challenge now and if I get to 1000 it will be nearly impossible to stick with it and maintain my sanity.
It’s a debate whether to follow everyone who follows you or not. At this time I don’t; before I opt to follow I look at the BIO and a few recent Tweets, then make my move. I’d like to be able to see value-add go in both directions. Nice goal but not totally doable.
For now I sit back and enjoy the ride,
Bob / http://www.twitter.com/dottedi
The greatest thing about Twitter is that if everyone decided to Unfollow any of these “twitter celebrities” they would immediately become irrelevant at least in the twitterverse. While we have not seen it happen yet, it will happen. One badly placed tweet, comment or interview and someone could “unfollowed” en masse. Twitter has had a profound impact on who is relevant and in my opinion flattened the world of social media.
I’ll probably get black-listed in the internet world for saying this, but it’s okay with me.
I (a non-celbrity / non-twitter major user with about 300 followers and friends) have been getting more and more dissatisfied with my “Twitter life” lately. I miss the “old days” when I followed people I care about, most of them followed me, and we had a new way of feeling connected. We used it how it was intended and shared what we were doing. Here are some quick thoughts:
1. I’m tired of the game. It’s not fun anymore.
2. Twitter is a great form of aggregating information, but how many people do I need to get links from? Ten, twenty? Certainly not 300 or 3,000.
3. Twitter will either hit a wall or reinvent itself. I’m not saying it will die – I’m not that stupid, but I do think that I’m not the only one that feels this way. At the same time, Twitter might reinvent itself and continue this trend.
4. A follow-up on #4. Contrast Twitter with Facebook. With Facebook you can follow a few hundred (or thousand) people without feeling overwhelmed. They have an excellent way of showing you the important information, then if you want more information on someone, you can intentionally get it.
Twitter gives you more access to people than Facebook, but it lacks the ability to aggregate that information so it’s useful to most individuals. Some Twitter apps give you the ability to do that, but I don’t think an app can run solely on sub-apps.
I like Twitter, but I’m just not having fun anymore :).
A better question is, why were they following thousands of people if they weren’t planning on continuing?
This is just like High School, and it’s all kind of silly. I follow a crap load of people, but I looked for them. People who are promoting the same thing that I am, and I want to see their updates.
Twitter has been an amazing source of information for me from others in the same business or have the same interest.
When someone unfollows me, I look at it as a good thing. It means that my core group is getting down to the people that are interested in what I have to say, and many times, they should have unfollowed because according to our bio’s we are not there for the same things.
I think people get so caught up in how many people are following them, that they miss the boat. It’s not about numbers, it’s about building a peer group to exchange ideas or keep each other informed.
I write about Dance Music, so I’ll take 100 hard core clubbers, producers and DJ’s over 10,000 SEO “Experts” on my follow list any day.
I think the practice of unfollowing everyone is lame and insincere. It shows a kind of vanity that is rather off-putting; people with agendas often abuse the hell out of web 2.0. Eventually it will snap backwards. They might not like the sting.
It’s not nice to talk to people and not care about their response, If you are not famous enough you will loose a lot of followers, I think is rude and they are missing the whole point of tweeter.
I’m OK with Lance Armstrong NOT following me – I want to read about his daily details. Its fun. That’s the point of Twitter. If social media gurus (clowns like Jason) are so “overwhelmed” they should just post links to YouTube and go back to the big 1997 idea of an InternetTV channel.
It’s not true that they did not lose any followers. They may not have lost a significant percentage of followers, but I’d wager many who remained didn’t even realized they had been unfollowed.
I have no issues with their unfollowing; everyone is entitled to use twitter as they see fit. Twitter started as micro-blogging and has evolved to include so much more. If someone wants to continue to micro-blog, that’s their prerogative.
That said, I think a wake up call is due any day now for the “Social Media Experts” on twitter – they are all tweeting the same thing over and over again and I’ve realized how senseless and stream-clogging it is for me to follow too many of them. If one of the “celebrities” tweets something of value, you can be sure that it will be retweeted throughout the twitterverse and end up in my stream anyway.
[...] recently posted an article about Jason Calacanis and Loic Le Meur unfollowing the people who were following them on Twitter. The post has already had almost 50 [...]
I was following a number of Twitter celebrities because they had been recommended on one blog or another. Realized I’m just not into what they have to say and want to concentrate on my interests so unfollowed a bunch this morning. Thanks for the wake up call. ~ Daryl
The flawed login in many of the criticisms here is the idea that you have to follow someone in order to have a conversation with them — you don’t.
As Jason said, following more than a few hundred is nonsense anyway – it’s the illusion of paying attention, but in fact there’s no way you really are.
What matters is that you reply to @ messages. THAT is conversation. I couldn’t care less if the person is following 0 or 100K — what really matters is if they’ll respond if I initiate a conversation with them.
If you think that being one of several thousand people someone is following means they’re being “social”, “conversational” or “authentic”, get over it. You’re kidding yourself. They can’t even see the Twitstream. Every update will be more than a screenfull.
It’s also incredibly ego-centric. Put yourself in their shoes. They don’t decide who follows them and who doesn’t. And they still have to get work done. Why in the world should they pretend to be paying attention when it’s physically impossible??
Personally, I respect their honesty. Follow or unfollow based on whether or not their twitstream creates value for you or not. Basing it on whether they follow you or not is based on some completely unrealistic idea that relationships are all symmetrical, and they’re not. It’s like a little kid saying, “If you’re not gonna play by my rules, I’m gonna take my ball and go home.”
Grow up.
I never even noticed Loic “unfollowed” me and wouldn’t have cared if I’d noticed. I’m pretty sure no one by people I really know in the non-virtual world would care if I unfollowed them. Unfollow away — Twitter is promiscuous and forgiving!
Er…Freudian slip. That’s “flawed logic”, not “flawed login”. :-/