I noticed that my number of followers stayed basically the same, despite lots of confirmations saying 'You have a new follower'. As Twitter only tells you who follows you not who 'unfollows' you I enlisted a piece of software ( www.unfollowers.me ) to track what's happening and to my amazement uncovered a whole new pastime...
Now I'm not sure if there really is some kind of game going on here, wherein we play 'I follow you, and you follow me then, sneakily, I stop following you so that it looks like I've got more followers than you... ' but it certainly seems that to some people Twitter is a competition in collecting followers, rather than sharing mutual interests.
Me - on Twitter
If it is, what's the end result? Do you win a medal? Do you sell loads of stuff to other people? Does it make you impossibly attractive? Do other twitterers play God and remove their 'follow' from you to bring you down a peg or two, issuing a metaphorical thunderbolt because you've got more twits following you then they have !?
Whats even more strange about this process I've discovered, is that some twits do this 'follow then unfollow' process over a couple of days, and some do it several times over the course of a month...
Perhaps they are trying to lure me in to some horrible fate that awaits me when I become their follower. Perhaps they've unfollowed me because they are peeved that I've taken no notice of them? Perhaps they see themselves as some kind of leader, a kind of social media Napoleon who's ego demands they appear more popular than all the other twits. If so, how sad, and what a huge waste of their time.
Dave
