
If you're not famous, joining Twitter is painful - diego
http://dbasch.posterous.com/why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-and-what
======
rlpb
Lose your ego. Develop a genuine interest in other people. If you aren't
interested in anyone else, then what reason do they have to care about you?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influence_people)

~~~
geoka9
Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked? I fail
to see any other legitimate use of it.

~~~
tezmc
I use it almost entirely as a news feed, I only very occasionally post things
myself.

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geoka9
OK, this is interesting.

Considering that a tweet is only 100-something characters, your use is
essentially equivalent to following an RSS-like feed for a news site. The only
difference is that the newsmaker can be anybody and you don't get to read a
full version of the news article. Right?

~~~
itcmcgrath
Yes. It is like massively decentralized news aggregation.

You can just follow any-old tag and see what comes up, or you can try and
improve the signal-to-noise ratio by following the people you generally enjoy
reading and create specific lists.

I've also found it helpful in big conferences. at the WCC2010 I switched
streams (there was 16) a few times because the quotes coming out of other
sessions hinted that the other one was more interesting/relevant to me.

~~~
danilocampos
...if you _want_ it to be.

What it actually is is plumbing that you can configure more or less how you'd
like. So it can be what you described. Or it can be any number of other
things.

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zdw
If your number of followers/friends/fans on Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. is
how you measure your self worth, you might want to readjust your values.

HN Karma is a much better method. :P

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tluyben2
Exactly the reason why I never really liked Twitter; people seem to care about
obtaining a maximum follower count and do not really look at quality. Once
obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. Sad. Same
sadness as Facebookers with thousands of friends. Maybe go do something
useful? Twitter can be fun and when you get followers because you are
interesting (somehow), it's fine. If you actually care however how many
followers you have and if you monitor and really care about your follower
growth, there is something emotionally wrong with you IMHO.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
Sounds like Twitter is really an MMORPG with a uniquely minimalist set of
gameplay mechanics.

~~~
tluyben2
Ha! In THAT case, they did a great job!

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
The article would suggest they just need to work on tuning the leveling
system- the initial grind is too much for some newbies.

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corin_
If you only want to be on twitter for your ego and you don't actually have the
ability to massage that ego, then who honestly cares.

The three suggestions in this post... just no. I get why people follow
celebrities, I don't want to myself, but many people do so fair enough. But
follow random people, and get random people to follow me? Twitter is a
communication tool, just like email, Skype, whatever. It's quite possible for
it to be useful with the people you actually know, you don't have to use it as
service for finding people you don't know to make yourself look popular.

~~~
diego
You're missing the point. The most value I get from Twitter comes from
interacting with other people, especially in serendipitous ways. It's not
about being followed by random people at all; it's about following (and being
followed by) people with whom you could have interesting conversations.

~~~
spooneybarger
So you want a synchronous relationship in an async medium?

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p4bl0
Twitter isn't about having the maximum number of followers. It's just another
way of communicating and get news and updates from people / groups / whatever
more instantly.

If you find it painful to not have 180k followoers then you're kind of a
looser. Sorry to say it like this. But this kind of attitude lead people to
mass-follow anyone to have some follow-back and that's creating spam and it's
kind of borring for normal-non-followers-needy twitter users.

~~~
diego
There's a difference between having 180k followers and having 0. Having 0 is
painful because you tweet into nothingness. My observation comes from trying
to get many of my friends started with Twitter, only to see that their tweets
get lots in the continuously-scrolling timelines of the five of us who follow
them back to get them started.

~~~
p4bl0
No you don't tweet into nothingness: your feed is public which means that you
can for instance show your last tweet on your blog/homepage/... and use
twitter as a quick update tool for visitor of your blog/site/... Also, you can
use hashtags to join a conversation (this is done better with groups in
status.net). In the same time start to follow people who say things that
interest you (news, links, personal update, event coverage...).

If you're not interested in any of the use cases above, then why start using
twitter at all?

~~~
diego
First off, no reason to downvote me because you disagreed with my comment. My
point is that if Twitter is trying to get past the point of people who do the
things you say (savvy social media people) and cross into the Facebook
mainstream, they need to give people _easy_ ways to be heard.

My post is from the point of view of the company, not the potential users. Why
start using Twitter at all is exactly right, and a problem for Twitter.

~~~
p4bl0
I don't have the down arrow on comments that are replies to my submissions or
comments, and anyway I wouldn't have downvoted you. I disagree with you but
that doesn't mean your comment is stupid or anything, we are discussing and I
see no reason to downvote you here (but I won't upvote you either, of course
;-)).

About our discussion: I get your point, but I think that simply for the usage
I described there are still a lot of people/company who can benefit from
Twitter (or equivalent, like status.net).

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cruise02
Are you really complaining that Twitter is too hard? It's taken me a couple of
years, but I've accumulated over a thousand followers on Twitter. Some of
those came through my blog, but most came through Stack Overflow where I'm a
moderator and active contributor. The point is that you have to actually do
something to make people want to follow you. Why would people give you their
attention (even micro slices of their attention) otherwise?

Also:

> I don't want Twitter to start looking into my Gmail and follow people who
> are on Twitter.

seems at odds with:

> This is why you should be very afraid of Google+, they give people an
> instant audience. That's very powerful.

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openbear
Twitter is NOT about mindlessly collecting a vast number of followers ...
unless you're a CEO trying to market your various companies.

Seriously folks, look at the author / submitter ...

"CEO of Flaptor, maker of IndexTank (indextank.com) Hounder (hounder.org) and
Trendistic (trendistic.com) among other things."

... this is the blog of a CEO who is trying to build a reputation and / or
brand awareness. Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind the intent of the
author when reading the OP.

"First, let's admit that part of what makes Twitter interesting is egos and
follower counts. There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't
exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off
some loser with only 500. When you join Twitter you are the bottom bitch."

I guess this is how folks with something to sell see Twitter. It's not how
anyone else I know who uses Twitter socially (as opposed to as a marketing
tool) see Twitter.

~~~
Helianthus
>There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other
social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with
only 500.

There is something about this attitude that is genuinely evil.

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whazzmaster
I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I
never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it
as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting.

Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the
twitterverse at-large?

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jrmg
How about following people you actually know, and then using twitter as a
communication medium?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yuuuup. Twitter is just a communication mechanism. If you're not leveraging
synergies and monetizing your social media with new configurations of value
that's not a problem in the least. Twitter is not some multi-level marketing
scam that you need to exploit. It's a way to keep up with people you like or
people you are interested in, famous or not.

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RegEx
Social media gurus preach brand awareness and engagement, but the truth is
most people care more about the actions of a common squirrel than you.

<http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel>

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serichsen
This is a matter of expectations. What did you expect?

I opened a twitter account when I noticed some people who had interesting
things to say and who did this on twitter. My expectation was a little "news"
feed. Then, while I was at it, I tweeted some things of my own, mostly
expressions of political opinion and insights. I also retweeted some things I
found interesting and worthy of attention. Suddenly, I had 3 followers. I did
not expect that, but I thought that it was great that someone was listening to
me. That did not change my expectations nor my behaviour.

Follower count? Who cares? I have 12 followers. Among them are a handful of
people that I respect very much, and I feel quite honoured that they are
willing to listen to what I say. This feels much more important to me than
100000 people following some sort of lolcats.

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aperrien
I posted this in the article itself, and I think it's relevant here:

The concept of location-based communications is a very powerful one. Imagine
that you were new to an area, and you wanted to meet locals with similar
interests. You should be able to create a tag about something that interests
you, and broadcast it out to people within, say, 1-2 miles and invite like
minded people out to coffee, or a movie, or some sort of similar event. This
provides a way to create real-life followers and build interests off of that.
If nothing else, I my end up writing something to do this myself...

I've wanted an app like this for a while now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to
build it on Google+ when their API comes out.

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socialmediaking
Get an autofollow/unfollow program which just follows people based on keyword,
followers list, following list, etc. You put a couple of interesting tweets,
and interesting username, and a background and profile image. It follows those
people, see who follows back and then after a certain amount of time unfollows
the ones who don't (or everyone) pretty easy way to get a lot of people seeing
your tweets.

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antihero
Why would people follow someone that doesn't actually exist? Twitter is for
people you already know, people they know, and then people that take your
interest along the way. It builds on existing friendships, as opposed to
starting with nothing. You might get lucky if you say good things to the right
people, but if you have no friends in real life, don't expect to be Mr.
Popular on Twitter.

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BenSS
I never cared much about my 'follower count', yet I've had some fantastic
conversations and gained a lot of valuable info via Twitter. I've got barely
over 100 followers, and a small proportion of them are people I know in real
life. Maybe twitter should be promoting the use of hashtag topics more, since
that's where I've found new people to follow and gotten followers by
contributing.

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notatoad
if you don't have anybody who wants to follow you, and you don't particularly
want to follow anybody, then yes i suppose joining twitter might be a
confusing process. but that's because twitter isn't suited to you.

tailoring a social web service towards antisocial people is probably not a
good business strategy.

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benjash
Like all social media, its no fun if you have no friends.

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prawn
Even as a marketing tool (and the same applies with a blog), you cannot expect
an instant return. You start with zero followers just like a blog starts with
few readers. You don't give up just because no one's listening, you create a
bit of history by effectively loss-leading - writing content that no one will
initially see and contributing to what you might want Twitter to be. Over
time, through search, links from your blog and interacting with other Twitter
users, you will build up some interaction and (if that's what you're there
for) influence.

I suppose the impatience and expectations of new users are that challenge for
Twitter, though it'd be nice to see more people realise this for themselves
rather than wait to have it solved for them.

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sacrilicious
As a premise for a blog post this isn't a particularly veiled attempt at
armchair quarterbacking twitter, and closing with 'k, now go follow me
everybody!' clangs instead of adding to the argument. I guess people who use
this reasoning as their entire purpose for interacting online turn me off to
the point that I don't anticipate ever joining Facebook, and still find very
little compelling about G+. People post to G+'s generic-looking interface
instead of blogging, and get piled on with comments, losing both personality
and clarity in contrast to something like Tumblr or traditional blogging.
Twitter and Tumblr are two great tastes that taste great together, however you
want to utilize them in my opinion.

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theflyingswami
I'm with the author of the article on this one. Call me egotistical all you
want but yeah, I tried Twitter for a few days and got really bored with it.
The author's complaints basically mirror my short Twitter experience. If I
tweet something and literally have 2 or 3 followers who will see it, why not
just send an Sms? Pointless.

So, I need a larger group of followers, no? But what motive does Twitter have
to get me to bust ass and try to build a follower base? None. I already took
the time to build a friend base some other social network and I'm in no mood
to start that process again.

As a means of getting up-to-the-minute news and information,Twitter excels.
But yeah, count me out.

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chmike
Just subscribed a short time ago and didn't have the same experience. I
started following some interesting people, from my point of view, and I
immediately got followers.

I suspect that some people follow new subscribers with similar interests so
that they follow back expecting the new subscriber to see who they are.

The other thing I did was to tweet a private message to some known person who
answered me. So this might have caught some attention too if it was seen by
others. Since one has to follow both people involved in a "private"
communication to see the exchange, this could motivate people to follow me.

~~~
darksaga
I've been on Twitter since the beginning and have had the same experience.
Start following some people, post some interesting things and you'll get
followers.

Another way to get followers is to either pimp a product or complain about a
product. More often than not, you'll get some followers and you might get a
response.

Either way, I've loved it. It's very stream of conscious and a great sounding
board for me.

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arthurgibson
If you're not famous, getting a reservation is painful...this is the truth for
a ton of things. Stoking the fire never hurts. Funny thing I tweeted at this
guy and got no response.

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dr_
Tell that to the teenage kids who were using twitter to communicate to people
that they were under assault. They were able to do it discreetly, without
having to vocalize themselves by a phone call.

Twitter has it's usefulness, but not everyone has realized it just yet. I hope
that changes - maybe the upcoming integration with iOS will allow it to.
Depending on how far it's integrated, it can provide developers some amazing
tools to work with.

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petercooper
No more painful than starting a blog, a podcast, or even a GitHub account. You
have to actually produce stuff to get attention in any case.

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v21
If you don't have friends to talk to and to listen to on a social media
service, don't be on that social media service.

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radarsat1
> Help me find newbies like me, who want to follow and be followed!

This is otherwise know as a "business opportunity".

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cdr
I have zero followers (I only really use it to respond to other people), and
Twitter is incredibly useful to me. It lets me easily and naturally interact
with well known/popular people I otherwise wouldn't normally have any reason
to interact with.

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brianwillis
I thought this article would be about how hard it is to get a decent Twitter
username now that spammers have taken up so many of them. That was my biggest
challenge, but Twitter doesn't really seem to care about the problem.

~~~
wtn
They would rather pretend to have 400 000 000 users than eliminate the crap
accounts.

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unkoman
Why do you even want followers? What makes you so interesting?

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InclinedPlane
I'm not famous, and twitter is awesome. I use it to keep up with my friends
and it works fantastically well. If you don't have friends who use twitter or
don't have friends maybe your experience would be different.

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ChristianMarks
I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic
questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could
be used to filter out who you interact with. The slider would set the
popularity threshold. You may prefer your account to interact with accounts
that have roughly the same number of followers as yours, with roughly the same
number of followers and the same karma.

In this system, following someone is no longer a binary proposition: you
follow someone at a given threshold. If your threshold is set below the number
of followers of the account, you don't see their tweets, and they don't get to
count you among their followers. As you move the slider, your view of Twitter
changes to match the threshold: accounts you may have followed at the higher
threshold drop off or become visible as you change settings.

Why do this? Well, if you're a new user, you may be tired of contributing to
someone else's power-law distribution. Why should you enable the rich to get
richer? Why not join a system where you can interact with other users at
comparable levels? Twitter is losing the Johnny-come-lately's anyway. So there
is an opportunity to encourage interactions that go beyond the discouraging
power-law phenomena in which a few users have most of the followers.

As Satan said, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." A follower
threshold feature could enable this, and it might generate interesting
analytics.

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drivebyacct2
So people still don't understand Twitter after all this time huh?

~~~
jsavimbi
It never gets old reading comments, or in this case a whole blog post coming
from people who are unable to grasp how Twitter is actually one thing but is
repurposed for a myriad of others, much to the enjoyment of many of its users.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I just don't understand the blog post anyway. "It's dumb to try to rack up
followers just for a number" right after "I can't get any followers".

Find a way to use Twitter to get content from people you like. My Twitter is a
combination of an RSS reader and a way for my friends to share quick thoughts
or links. There is overlap with Facebook and overlap with Google Reader, but
there is lots of content that I get from Twitter or discover on Twitter...
that I can't find elsewhere.

I feel like if people spent more time following people they knew or developers
they like or project/product managers, etc, they would actually see the value
in Twitter, rather than trying to take this ivory tower approach.

~~~
geoka9
I think I now know what my problem with Twitter is. I'd like to follow some
developers I like, but I just don't feel like reading about their personal
life or random thoughts. And this seems to be a big part of any personal
Twitter stream.

~~~
flamingbuffalo
that's the benefit of being able to quickly (and silently) unfollow someone.
Personally, I use a "3 tweets in a row that are annoying = unfollow" rule. It
works well for me. And anyways, you'll often be surprised at how someone you
respect professionally can be ver entertaining in their personal life.

