Follow Limits - a Discussion

[Jesse Stay]

Let's discuss the follow limits.  I feel, as developer of a tool that allows people to auto-follow, I have a bit of insight into this.  While there are many, many legitimate users that auto-follow others, and have good reason to do so, some are using it as a way to game the system, build followers quickly, break the Twitter TOS, and reduce the meaning of follower numbers for many other users just using the service legitimately.  I see this daily, amongst a few of my own users, and while, due to our privacy policy I can't share who they are, I do have some suggestions that would make the API follow limits make a little more sense.  Maybe you guys can provide more insight.

-Currently the follow per day limit is 1,000 follows per user per day.  There is no limit on the number of unfollows a user can do per day (that I know of), and it appears as though there is also a limit of around 10% for the number of users a person can follow more than follow them back.  The users taking advantage of Twitter have figured this out.  So here's what they do:

A "gamer"'s typical activity is that they will follow as many people as they can - most up to the 1,000 limit they're allowed per day, until they hit the ratio of 10%.  The higher the follower base they gain, the longer they're able to do this.  They then hope a good portion of those 1,000 people follow back.  Those that don't use tools like mine (which weren't intended to be used this way) to unfollow everyone who is not following them back.  This is often much greater than 1,000 for the users that are really good at it.  The process then starts over.  They'll use tools like Hummingbird (Google it) and Twollo to find people and automatically go out and follow them.  This is why I refuse to create auto-follow filters to find new people on my service. It's way too spammy if you ask me.

Why do they do this?  2 reasons: 1, "supposedly" having more followers means more visits and clicks in whatever you're trying to promote. (I don't believe this)  and 2, many of these people also have auto-DM set up to send links and messages to each person that follows them back.  Back when I offered this service (we disabled it for this exact reason) people told me they were seeing significant clicks on the links they would send to people via DM after they followed them.  Therefore, more follows==more clicks==more revenue. I don't blame them if that's what they're really seeing.

So for this reason I think having limits in place is a *good* thing.  I don't think the follow limit is in place due to traffic reasons, since there are many more calls that cause more traffic on the API and there is no limit to unfollows, so I really think Twitter is doing this for the purpose of reducing spam and "gaming" of Twitter.  This is a good thing.

However, I think Twitter may be approaching the limits the wrong way.  Here's what I think would be more effective, and beneficial for the legitimate users that want to follow back and at the same time not allow those who want to game the system to use the methods I described.  Twitter needs to impose limits based on whether the individual is following the user back or not.

For instance, if I follow @dacort and he is following me back, that shouldn't count against me as a hit against my follow limit.  However, if I try to follow @dacort and he is not following me back, it should count against me as a hit against my limit.  With this, users could easily auto-follow back if they choose to, and it would still be difficult for the users trying to game the system and spam Twitter.  In fact, you could significantly *reduce* the limit this way and make it virtually impossible for these users to use Twitter in that manner.  If you were to look at the relationship between the users when counting against limits, you could probably reduce the follow/day limit all the way to around 200 per day instead of 1,000 per day.  I don't see any reason for the 10% follow/follower ratio with a low limit such as that.

However, as stands, the more followers you get, if you are using Twitter legitimately, you have no way to extend the courtesy back if you choose to do so, since after a certain point you will be following many more than 1,000 users per day.  And even if you aren't, it will take an extremely long time for many individuals to finally catch up to follow those following them if they want to at 1,000 follows per day.

I know there are some that disagree with the auto-follow concept.  However, I also know most of you also want Twitter to be an open environment where people can choose to use it as they please.  Doug, Alex, etc. I'd love it if you guys could at least consider changing the follow limits as I mentioned.  The current limits are doing nothing to prevent the spammers - my suggestions I believe will, and will keep it an open environment for the rest of us.

Sorry for the long discourse - I would really love to hear others thoughts and suggestions.

@Jesse

[Abraham Williams]

Can someone tweet a summery to @abraham? :-P

Thanks,

Abraham

--
Abraham Williams | Community | http://web608.org
Hacker | http://abrah.am | http://twitter.com/abraham
Project | http://fireeagle.labs.poseurtech.com
This email is: [ ] blogable [x] ask first [ ] private.
Sent from Madison, WI, United States

[Jesse Stay]

The summary is I propose that the follow limits be dependent on whether a user is following an individual or not. It should only count against me if the user is not following me already and I try to follow them.  :-)

Jesse

[Paul Kinlan]

Hi,

As the developer of Twollo here are my thoughts.

Auto un-follow:

I have not implemented it, I am unlikely too - it has lost me users for not doing it. I developed Twollo to help you find people to follow.  I have *a lot* of requests to develop a feature that will auto-un-follow after X days of following a person, this feature is only ever used to cycle Twitter accounts and grow the follower base.

I can understand to some extent that the auto-follow process has a false positive rate and that you don't really want to follow them, but that can be solved as a function of my UX.

Auto follow:

I strongly believe that auto follow is a very good feature when used in a responsible way.  It can be abused, but there are people that want to engage with their users over and above a tweet.  If you are engaging with your users, using a simple search is a good way to talk to people talking about you, but there is a very positive feeling that people get when a "company/twitter" follows them because it feels like that company is listening to them in an on going basis.

It is not the auto-follow which is the bad thing, it is the use of it (I am not trying to use the "its not guns that kill people" argument) on the back of knowing that there is a good chance of people being nice and following you back and then cycling the accounts of people who don't - it is the unfollow which is the bad part.

There will be quite a large back lash from users, if you can only follow 200 people a day (even discounting the argument that reciprocated follows are free).  I personally don't think reciprocated follows should be free, every follow should be considered in complete isolation.

Some Thoughts:

The reason why people cycle their accounts followers is to (1) get past the 2000 follow limit and (2) to look like they are authoritative on their subjects, you are more likely to follow someone who has a lot of followers already (3) to have a large audience to push their wares through. Rate limit the un-follow api request, make it a value less than the auto follow limit so if I can auto follow 1000 people per day, I can only un-follow 200, or group 1000 the follow limit and an the unfollow limit together.  The first will stop (or at least vastly slow down) people rinsing their accounts because they have to control their growth.  

I think people need to get rid of the "etiquette" of reciprocating a follow if you don't really have in interest in people, especially if you reach the point where you.  The only time that I can see this being of value is if you are a company engaging with your customer base, but even then there aren't that many companies with such a large base.  It is very hard to see the value of following more than say 2000 users without having decent filters in place to target interesting tweets.

Twitter could white list accounts to allow them to follow more people than the current limit, you wonder if it could even be charged for.

I would also like to see Twitter pushing the last tweet and profile text out in the emails that people get when someone follows you.

I do have a question:  Where do people think the majority of reciprocated follows come from?  I personally think that it is from the emails Twitter send out.  If you think about it, from a marketers point of view, they are using Twitter as a trusted source to deliver their message directly in users inbox.  I wonder if there is a case for not sending the email from users who have followed/auto followed a lot of people in a day, or stopping that functionality altogether for that user.  If you think about it the user who is doing the following is unlikely to know the message has not been delivered, they follow a lot of people, it will appear on their stats, they can unfollow as many people as they want it won't help them build their network;

Paul.

2009/6/10 Jesse Stay <jess...@gmail.com>

[Jesse Stay]

The problem right now with an unfollow limit is that if they do choose to reciprocate following (which is a practice I personally like to do myself for the reasons stated - it's more than just "etiquette". I do it because it builds community and encourages conversation.), eventually some users will unfollow them after the follow, and their ratio gets out of whack.  After so many users stop following them, with no following action on their own they can no longer reciprocate follow anyone else.  Therefore an auto-unfollow is necessary just to allow you to continue the auto-follow process.  If the ratio and 2,000 follower limit were removed auto-unfollow would no longer be necessary, regardless of whether the user is legitimate or not.  I don't see a problem with a limit but I don't think anyone would notice the limit unless they were trying to remove all the people they had previously followed to start over.  In that case you would see complaints for such a limit.

Honestly, I can't see any legitimate reason for doing a search for people to follow and following more than 200 of those people in a day, other than collecting spam lists or trying to build up following numbers, reducing the value of those numbers.  How do you see people using this in a way that is not what I stated?  I think 200 ought to be sufficient for legitimate purposes, but I'm not Twitter.  Regardless, I see no reason to limit people from following those that are already following them back beforehand - is there anyway you can think of that removing such a limit would cause improper use of the system?

Jesse

[Paul Kinlan]

Its an interesting topic.  I wouldn't say the 2000 limit would make auto unfollow necessary - you have to remember the people using auto-unfollow are mostly doing it to cycle their accounts get as many followers and not to have a massive skew on their follower/following ratio to make them appear to be spammers etc the current limits imposed are a just a temporary barrier.

Your right, none of us are Twitter and I don't think we have any or much direction in the policy, but I know a lot of people are using auto follow for a variety of none spam reasons.

• Clone accounts quickly,
• Follow everyone who follows me but I don't follow
• Follow everyone someone else is following - so you can see what they see
• Follow all the followers of another twitterer - brand building normally
• Follow everyone talking about your company, band, group, meeting to engage with them.
• Build Groups

I am personally not arguing for an increase in the limits although I would argue against a decrease in the number of people you can follow in a day.

When building twollo I never thought about it but there are groups of people on twitter using twollo to follow a common hashtag and autofollow so that they can share and dynamically build a group - kind of like sharing a contact list, but automatically.  For example they might make a hashtag called #kittenknitting or something random, everyone will register with twollo then tweet with #kittenknitting and twollo will then build follow and build their network for them, some of these groups are large and they want to ensure they follow everyone in that group.

Paul

[Dewald Pretorius]

Jesse,

Twitter will always be between a rock and a hard place, because one
can be certain that there will be folks who will find new ways to take
advantage of of any change they make in their rules.

Something I have seen with TweetLater is that some people are
extremely creative when it comes to abusing stuff. Trying to write
code to thwart them is like chasing bats in the middle of the night
with a squash racquet, while wearing a blindfold.

Dewald

On Jun 10, 2:53 am, Jesse Stay <jesses...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The summary is
> I propose that the follow limits be dependent on whether a user is following
> an individual or not. It should only count against me if the user is not
> following me already and I try to follow them.  :-)
> Jesse
>

> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Abraham Williams <4bra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can someone tweet a summery to @abraham? :-P
> > Thanks,
> > Abraham
>

[Caliban Darklock]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Jesse Stay<jess...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Honestly, I can't see any legitimate reason for doing a search for people to
> follow and following more than 200 of those people in a day, other than
> collecting spam lists or trying to build up following numbers, reducing the
> value of those numbers.

Every number on a computer is a score. The purpose of a score is to
get a high one.

No matter how you slice it, a vast number of people are going to play
"Twitter: The Video Game", where the goal is to get as many followers
as you can in the shortest possible time.

No matter how hard it is to do, people will still play it. You can't
stop the game without stopping legitimate use of the service. Indeed,
legitimate use of the service is the official ruleset of the game. If
you're not building your score with legitimate use of the service,
that's "cheating".

Trouble is, legitimate use of the service is something of a grey area,
because it mostly depends on what you're thinking when you use it. If
you follow someone thinking "this person is interesting", that's
legitimate. If you follow someone thinking "this person may follow me
back", it's not.

Likewise, if you're thinking "people should know about this", posting
a URL is legitimate. If you're thinking "people will click this and I
will make money", it's not.

[Jesse Stay]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Caliban Darklock <cdar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Every number on a computer is a score. The purpose of a score is to

get a high one.

No matter how you slice it, a vast number of people are going to play
"Twitter: The Video Game", where the goal is to get as many followers
as you can in the shortest possible time.

Caliban I agree - I'm simply proposing that my solution for follow limits is at least a little better for users than what Twitter is currently doing.  What is being done currently hurts the legitimate users more than it does the spammers.  removing the ratios, reducing the limits, and removing the limit entirely for following users that are already following an individual, IMO makes much more sense so long as we're going to limit people in this.  The other option is to just remove limits entirely, but I don't expect Twitter to do that.

I'd love for Doug or Alex to get into this discussion, but I suppose it's not up for discussion it would seem.

Jesse 

[dewald]

Jesse,

> I'd love for Doug or Alex to get into this discussion, but I suppose it's
> not up for discussion it would seem.

I think it is a matter of Twitter, especially the founding members,
going through the agony of seeing their brainchild being used in ways
they did not intend, and witnessing their "baby" so to speak morph
into something they don't recognize and on some days perhaps even
don't like all that much.

As a fellow developer, you know how it is. You develop something with
a particular purpose and vision. And you have a level of affinity for
your own product that you created.

Seeing it change into something else, similarly to Twitter witnessing
their platform morphing from a social platform into one massive
marketing platform is an excruciating process.

When I analyze the people who follow my @dewaldp account on a daily
basis, I spot the rare "real" social user now and then. The rest are
all just tweeting links, or tweeting stupid bloody quotes.

So, I don't think it's a not-up-for-discussion issue. I think it's a
case of them not knowing exactly what to do about this. Do they
forcibly steer Twitter back towards a pure social platform, and put
higher risk on personal fortunes? Or do they let things continue as
is, which will probably result in higher valuation numbers?

Dewald

[Caliban Darklock]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Jesse Stay<jess...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Caliban I agree - I'm simply proposing that my solution for follow limits is
> at least a little better for users than what Twitter is currently doing.
> What is being done currently hurts the legitimate users more than it does
> the spammers.

Whatever you do to limit behavior will always hurt legitimate users
more than spammers, because the spammers are a tiny minority of users.

Personally, I agree that removing all limits is the right thing to do,
because if you uncork the abuse pipeline... the abuse becomes a LOT
easier to see. When you see someone jump on the service and follow
50,000 people, you can flag that person immediately and watch their
tweets for a day or two. When they start pumping out worthless crap,
you see it, and you shut down their account.

Give them enough rope to hang themselves, basically, and they'll do it
faster. If there's no documented limit, they'll remain totally
clueless about the limits that trigger a watch, and it will take them
a long time to figure it out. If you tweak it constantly, the way
Google does their ranking criteria, they'll settle into a pattern of
behaviour that simply isn't abusive.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 6:03 PM, dewald<dpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it is a matter of Twitter, especially the founding members,
> going through the agony of seeing their brainchild being used in ways
> they did not intend

Welcome to community development. Whatever you create, no matter how
pure your intentions, will ultimately be turned into a platform for
sex, spam, and stupidity. I'm sure Jon Postel rolls over in his grave
whenever someone posts on icanhascheezburger.com ;)