Everyday on Twitter, a handful of people unfollow me. And likewise several follow me. I follow almost everyone who follows me and unfollow everyone who unfollows me.
It's been a while since I initiated a follow, but the ones I have whom I follow but don't follow me reflects some of those folks. (I'm following 3913 as of this minute, with 3833 followers.) I say it reflects some of them because there's a bunch, I don't know how many, who follow me but I never followed them.
I really don't know any of them. I know a few of them (less than 10) better than the ones I don't know at all, but even these relationships (laughable use of the word) are nothing. In short, I don't know anyone on Twitter.
Following the 3913 as I do, naturally I don't keep track of what they're saying most of the time. The only ones I see are the ones whose tweets happen to be streaming past in the three-to-four minutes a day I'm looking at it, on TweetDeck. I see their names in that little space of time, but they're all the same. None of them except the less-than-10 I mentioned do I recognize even in the slightest.
Now, 3913 isn't really very many compared to some of them I've seen. Take FacetStudio in the graphic, following 68726! That's huge! But still, 3913 is quite a few if you were trying to keep track of them. On TweetDeck, the tweets of these are zipping by extremely fast, blip-blip-blip. In a few seconds they've scrolled off the screen, never to be seen again.
One other thing about me unfollowing. I said I unfollow anyone who unfollows me. But I don't initiate unfollows otherwise. The reason is, frankly, who cares? They're not bothering me in the slightest. I do unfollow these other characters because, WTF? Why are you unfollowing me? I'm not doing anything that should get too many people agitated.
Recently, though, I did a few political humor tweets. In the larger scale of anything, about as consequential as tossing a pebble in the ocean. Maybe someone would unfollow me for that. But usually, it seems to be the most random, unnecessary act in the world to, suddenly out of the blue, unfollow me.
In the graphic I have two who unfollowed me recently, out of bunches. They're opposites, that's why they're pictured.
Let's look at IAMPREVALENT. I don't know if I initiated the follow in that case or not. Probably not, because at the time I was looking for people who would follow me back. Prevalent's balance doesn't show that as being likely. So apparently Prevalent initiated things by following me first. Then I followed back. At some point, then, Prevalent unfollowed me. We ask why? It looks obvious that Prevalent wants to get a lot of followers without actually following back. So I can see why I would be unfollowed. That one is very clear.
The more interesting one is FacetStudio. Following 68726, followed by 81662. It could be Facet is going the way of Prevalent and I just happen to be one of the first ones to go. Just unfollowing us wholesale, if that's what happened, OK. But excluding that, I can't think of a good reason. Like I said, following 3833 is so many I don't know one person from another. If I were following over 68000, it's going to be so much worse, why would I be micromanaging it to such a degree that this guy and this guy get the ax? I wouldn't know those guys in the slightest, there'd be no reason.
Of course I'm looking at all this from the way I do things. But maybe Facet, having a studio and everything, has higher standards in who to follow and unfollow, and a greater system of doing it. Maybe there's employees tinkering with the following list, always at work pruning it for merchandising purposes or whatever. Since I haven't bought a painting, the computer is blinking and beeping: NUMBER 53,456 MUST BE CUT OFF! It's such a large outfit in my imagined version of things that they're turning us over at super speed, like the way they continually rotate silage so it doesn't burst into flames. (Rural background.)
The weird thing would be if Facet is just a guy like me, sitting at his computer, manually and purposefully tending to his 68726 follows. He'd have to be some kind of super brain, and definitely more into worthless minutia than I'll ever be!
Take care, IAMPREVALENT. Following only 18, your feed is nothing. That'd be nice. And take care, FacetStudio. Whatever you're up to, it's cool.
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