Fickle Followers

I'm shedding 'followers' like nobody's business, it seems.  I lost five from Twitter alone yesterday and two over the weekend.  Plus, I notice that I've lost half of my 'followers' from this blog.  OK, so I only had two, count 'em two, followers here in the first place, but what the Hell, half is half!  Not that I actually care.  I've mentioned before the fickleness of Twitter followers.  There are too many people using Twitter who seem to expect you to follow them back just because they've decided, for their own reasons, to follow you.  It's a mentality I've never really understood.  If I follow someone on Twitter it is because I think that they are tweeting interesting or entertaining stuff.  I don't necessarily expect them to feel the same way about my tweets and reciprocate the follow.  Following shouldn't be predicated upon the expectation of being followed back.  Not that I'm rigid about these rules - generally speaking, I'll always follow back fellow Humorfeed or Overnightscape Underground members who follow me - it's the courteous thing to do as these are the two main online communities I participate in: it should go without saying that their tweets are going to be of interest to me.

There's another sort of 'fickle follower' - the apparently automated accounts like, I don't know, 'John Travolta News', which aggregate tweets made about, in this case, John Travolta, and automatically follow the tweeting account in case it makes any more relevant tweets.  Sometimes their following is only for a couple of days, sometimes several weeks.  It is accounts of this type which made up most of my lost 'followers' over the past few days.  But they might come back.  I've had the situation where they unfollow you one week then, when you make a tweet on their subject again the next week, they follow you all over again.  They're a real pain in the arse, to be honest.  Then we come to the blog followers.  I've never understood this activity (which is facilitated by most blogging platforms these days).  If I'm interested in a blog, I'll just visit it whenever I've got time to see if it has been updated.  I don't need to 'follow' it.  I think that some blog followers expect some degree of interaction with the blogs they follow.  Well, I'm sorry, but that's something I'm just not into, replying to comments, for instance, is a chore as far as I'm concerned. Sure, I do respond to a handful of commenters, mainly fellow bloggers on specialist subjects. like exploitation movies.  But the fact is that I really don't want to be anyone's 'buddy' or 'pal' online.  I know it might seem strange for someone as anti-social as I am to be publishing stuff online, but the fact is that the web is the perfect platform on which to put your ideas out there without actually having to deal directly with people.  If you like what I write, great.  If you don't, that's fine, too.  But either way, there really is no need to tell me about it!