Get off my lawn! (Twitter gripes)
Yeah this is just gonna be a long, rambly/ranty post about Twitter shit. Sorry.
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I’m not the sort of Twitter person who gives a shit about the numbers. Or rather, I don’t care how many follow me. I don’t ask for more. When people request to follow me, unless I know of them, I usually stare and get all grumpy-old-man-get-off-my-lawn about it. There’s a reason I have a locked profile. Well, numerous reasons. But one of them is so that I don’t have irritating/annoying/spammy people following me. Recently, what appeared at first to be a spammy dude calling himself tiny_penis, asked to follow me. Based on his first tweets and his profile I declined. Why? numerous reasons really but he just didn’t seem to be the sort of person I wanted replying to my innocuous tweets and making them relevant to his tiny penis revolution.
Tangent: I decline a lot of people who request to follow me. I say and do and show things on Twitter that are more personal than my blog and so part of my pickiness is privacy protection. If someone doesn’t have a profile/timeline that interests me, seems relevant to me, or if they don’t have any tweets or just look “sketchy” to me then I don’t allow their request to follow. Men, and usually even women, who make it clear on their profile that their Twitter profile is a means and method to flirt and get cybersex are a definite no. Submissive men who only play the submissive role on their profile and in their tweets also probably won’t get in. I don’t want or need or like seeing a random barely-relevant reply to my tweets along the lines of “May I kneel at your feet” or something. Yes, I’ve had it, and that’s why I don’t allow them anymore.
So the tiny_penis guy gets a decline. And then (man this irks me when people do this, like I’m gonna change my mind??) requests again. THEN he @’s me on Twitter saying he knows I declined and wants to know why. First of all, my profile is locked and so he wouldn’t even see my reply.
But ….. yes he will. Because I made a comment on twitter about this, he then replies again to me saying he’s sorry to bother but what’s the harm in asking why? Which means he saw my tweet. I ask how and he claims a friend relayed it to him. I’m thinking this is just a secondary secret profile of someone already following me. That or he’s telling the truth and it’s a little creepy. Either way it’s creepy. If someone with a locked profile declines your request it is bad etiquette to start demanding to know WHY. It’s my timeline, my Twitter, my circle. I have control over it for a REASON and no I do NOT owe anybody explanations every time I decline a request.
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Random irk: When people ask me on Twitter for my email address. Um, well, my blog address is in my profile and on this blog here my address is readily available. Lazy much?
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Random irk 2 (and 3 and 4, clearly): Why do some people RT a FollowFriday in which they were named? If you’d like to thank someone for it, then just @ them directly. And why do some people FF me when they don’t ever interact with me? If you actually thought me interesting and worth following, wouldn’t you interact with me on Twitter? And WHY do some people RT a tweet in order to reply to the person. I don’t need to see your conversation if I don’t follow the person.
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I’ve gotten a little more heavy-handed with unfollowing lately. I’ve unfollowed some people and it doesn’t mean I don’t like them anymore (in most cases). Why do people get so pissy about that? It’s not always personal – I might very well still read and like your blog and you as a person. But some people that were in my timeline were either doing nothing by RT’ing/Tweeting about EF/Sexis articles and not saying anything personal; or doing so many effin contest tweets that it felt like it was all I ever saw from them. I’m sorry if I don’t want to see bombardments of contest entries, thirteen tweets about an article, you selling your used panties, or your incessant hashtag games. I clearly personally offended these people so most did the retaliatory unfollow. *sigh* Go for it if it helps you. Why does unfollowing someone on Twitter have to be taken SO fucking seriously?
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Actually, why does ANY of this shit matter? To me, to you, at all?
Man I’m ranty. I thought about being cheeky and adding a poll to see how many people reading this got personally offended, but what’s the point? If you are, speak the hell up and say so.
I am not trying to feed the crank monster, but I have often wondered about this myself. How do random people who are not connected to anyone I currently interact with find me in the first place?
I have been so choosy about my followers of late, and some repeatedly request. I have decided with some of them that I will just let the request hang there, rather than accept of deny it. At least then, they cannot ask again. :)
~ Actually they CAN ask again. Or they could. I’ve had people send another request if I let their first sit in the queue. I agree, I’m not sure how they find me. But I stand by my thought that he’s got another account. Bc not one of his followers follow me.
I don’t follow you on twitter (and you don’t follow me, and I’m not griping about either!) but I’ve seen some of the same odd behavior you’ve experienced, though not by any tiny penis.
Well, at least not by anyone named tinypenis.
Anyway, what I was going to say before I started off on a tangent, is this:
Social network etiquette – Facebook, twitter, blogs, Fetlife, etc – is the new frontier of manners. All of those polite interactions we learned as teenagers (“Get out of my way dumbass!” and shoving smaller kids into lockers) is starting to present itself on social networks. Except, no one knows the rules, or we make them up as we go along, or different groups of people seem to have different rules. I don’t see anything wrong with your stance regarding accepting/refusing requests (I refuse friend requests on Facebook from people I used to know in childhood, and refuse requests on Fetlife from strangers).
In other words, the persistence of tiny_penis reminds me a bit of the 7th grade boy who didn’t get invited to the girls-only birthday party in the 8th grade: “Hey, if I can’t come, I’m gonna come and peek in the window and see your panties! So there!”
In any event, how did you see tiny_penis’s tweets? Apparently, they’re protected. At least now they are.
s
~HAHAHA that’s fuckin awesome. “At least now they are” is the key phrase there, obviously. He just very recently protected his tweets. I did screen caps though, I didn’t upload them before but now I will!
re: FB and Fetlife: Me too. All these ppl I kinda knew in HS try to friend me and I decline most of them. I don’t give a shit to know them now and the only reason they’re probably doing the req is bc my profile is completely closed to people who aren’t direct friends.
YOU READ MY MIND!!!!
I especially am annoyed by the RT junk so that everyone in their timeline can see their conversation with someone I don’t follow. I DON’T FUCKING CARE!
You can RT a funny – or something you think is cool. But answering a “HELL YEAH” for someone’s attention-whoring drives me fucking insane.
But you totally forgot about Formspring. I’ve never wanted to be a hacker until that started up. I have no problems with people playing it or whatever, but why it has to show up in their TL is beyond me. It is an instant Exit on my phone app if I peek in and see what people are up to when all it is are the lamest 8th grade questions ever.
Unfollow
Unfollow
Unfollow
And they can unfollow me back. I don’t care. I don’t have an app that follows those things, nor will I ever. It’s TWITTER!
/rant
(God, I feel better)
~ What I hate about Formspring is that some people I follow use it and get asked like a million inane questions AND THEY ANSWER THEM. And then there’s some anonymous person going around asking the bloggers all the same exact inane questions. Ones I refused to fuckin answer.
I’ve never used Twitter mostly because I don’t feel I have enough to say to warrant an entire page of just me ranting. But when I get crap like littlepenis on Facebook I ignore their friend request because they can’t resend and it just sits in limbo forever.
I’ve recently learned that you can separate your friends in categories. Best. thing. ever. So now I have a special category just for annoying people. The ones that post nothing interesting (ie. work schedules) and make it so we are still friends but they can only see my picture and nothing of their stuff is posted to my newsfeed. I figured this out after unfriending annoying people and then getting tons of messages from them asking what happened and why I unfriended them… by simply changing their category they never know I did anything :D
Can I add to this list a few of my faves:
Repetitiveness. If your tweets on Monday are pretty much the same thing everyday why should I follow you – been there, read that.
Over-the-top-insane-emo tweets. I’ve tweeted some emo crap myself but everyday? Get a therapist or a prescription.
And the same attention whoring pics everyday. I got it – you have tits, ass, cock, etc. Say something else otherwise I’ll just think of you as a mindless mound of flesh without a brain because you don’t use your words.
Whew – that feels good. Thanks for letting me rant too.
~ I’ve unfriended before for depressive tweet streams. I feel bad that your cat is sick, you’re sick, you’re broke, you need a job, you need our money BUT JESUS Twitter is not Goodwill!
re: Attention Whoring: yeah. I can think of one in particular. I’m a perv, I like to see nudey pics but when it’s the SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER holy fuck get a new bra & panties set and think up a new angle.
I am SO offended OMG OMG OMG….
Actually you made me giggle.
I have been watching when I lose followers and the things that send them off in droves crack my shit up. It’s fun.
~ What cracked me up the most was the day I expected to lose followers bc I dared to challenge a big, bad Dom….I didn’t. Instead I gained followers. It was hysterical.
A-fucking-men to everything you said! I recently went on an unfollowing spree and feel so much better
The whole social networking thing…. Manners were lost. Serenity said a lot of what I was going to.
I am seriously considering taking myself off both Twitter and Facebook personally. Just staying on professionally. I plan on just talking about business….
This Joker gets tired of the drama….so I can seriously relate to your post.
Duuude the thing where people RT others and reply to them makes me wanna die. I think it’s people not understanding how to have convos on Twitter, but it’s so obnoxious.
You know what? You terribly offended me by not giving us a poll to play with. :P
Jokes aside, I hate that kind of behavior. Highschool “friends” who spam you with facebook friend requests, then throw a bitch fit when you won’t friend them. Creepy people on Twitter. Spammy people on twitter. (And saying “Warning! Contest spam for the next few minutes! Sorry!!1!11!!!eleventy!!” doesn’t make it ok) While I haven’t locked my Twitter account yet, I’ve seriously considered it. People seriously have no sense of netiquette.
I’m so terribly guilty of all of these offenses! I’m such a noob when it comes to twitter and I’m never sure what in the hell the etiquette is. I barely use my twitter and I’m the dork that does more tweet reading then actual tweeting lol. When you mentioned the #ff I totally retweeted mine thinking that, that was the thing to do, sense it had never happened to me before. I was clueless as to what I needed to do next. I don’t tweet often but I make sure it’s something worth saying, showing or sharing. I’m not easily offended and if anything I wouldn’t want someone to continue to follow me if they found me aggravating that serves no purpose. The worst thing that’s come up for me is the retweeting of your tumblr, which has become an unhealthy addiction for me. Recently I lost a slew of followers because I left my twitter feed on while tumbling so everything I tumbled ended up on twitter. It was terrible, I’m still shaking my head about it.
You make very good points in your post and honestly I think you have every right to be aggravated. Especially if you deal with people in the reviewing community and you have streams of contest and what not in your feed all the time. I think we’ve all become too comfortable with each others information. There is an unhealthy amount of TMI floating around these days and that’s enough to piss off anyone.
I have actually used twitter to ask for your address because I guess I didn’t notice it with the custom image you use in the sidebar. I tend to look for text and I -remember- thinking “How odd that Lilly would make herself so hard to contact.” Maybe I was tired? LOL