Follow/Unfollow

Lately I seem to acquired several more Twitter followers, all of them pretty random.  (I don't mean fellow Humorfeed members who have followed me - I'm glad to have them aboard and follow them back).  Over the weekend, for instance, I seemed to pick up a whole load of those feeds that just quote, well, quotes or, worse, song lyrics.  I really don't know why they've chosen to follow me, but I do know that they'll unfollow me pretty soon if I don't follow them in return.  Which I won't.  I've been through this quite a bit over the past few weeks, you see.  I've even had some random feed follow, then unfollow, me twice over the past couple of weekends. The fact is that unless another feed has some relevance to me, belongs to someone I know or just seems interesting, I'm unlikely to follow them, regardless of whether they follow me.  But such is the pernicious nature of social media, where people seem to think that their importance is measured in the number of 'friends' or 'followers' they have, regardless of whether they interact with them or are even interested in anything they post.

I can honestly say that I've never followed anyone on Twitter with the expectation of being followed in return.  That way lies only frustration, bitterness and probably madness.  I've also never followed anyone with the expectation that they will be so grateful that I'll do some favour for them.  Such 'favours' can be as simple as retweeting something for them.  However, I'm not into retweeting stuff I'm not really interested in on behalf of some internet campaign I'm not involved in - so don't bother following me if that's all you want me to do, it's not very flattering to be seen as some kind of relay station by random web users.  Other 'favours' people have seemed to have wanted are links to their sites from The Sleaze, or even for me to carry their content on my site.  Again, they all went away disappointed, abruptly unfollowing me in the process.  So, random Twitter users, follow me if you like, but don't expect anything in return, (unless you are interesting enough for me to follow back), because doing so really defeats the object of the exercise.