Scott Jangro and I are recovering from an interesting experiment in which we followed back everyone who followed us. Sounds pretty simple and easy, right?
Well, it is an easy task to click “Follow” under a person’s avatar, but it is a much more difficult thing to give away a sense of sanity on Twitter.
Jangro explains it incredibly well:
Does anybody really think that anyone with thousands of followers is reading anything but a select list of tweets? What’s the use of an army of followers who follow everybody back? Especially at the expense of having to follow them and ruining twitter for yourself. Neither cares about what each other has to say. It’s just a game of who has the biggest, uh, Twitter.
I’ve cut down from the 4,500 or so people I was following back to the 100 or so folks that I am actually interested in or care about. Twitter is completely usable again on my Touch, on the web, on my mobile and on the desktop via TweetDeck.
So, it’s all well and good to follow everyone who follows you if you are looking to gain more followers on Twitter. However, doing so comes at a cost of usability of the service (much more than the cost of losing a few bots as followers as shown in the chart above).
