And no one likes being told that they’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake, so I’ll understand if this upsets some of you. But the reality is that on Twitter, thanks to its asymmetric social graph, that quite often doesn’t happen.Īnd so we have a Twitter ecosystem that has more negative ratio users than the other way around. The reason is that it goes up against a fundamental belief of social networking: The idea that if you follow someone, whether you admit it or not, you want them to follow you back. The fact is that while most people do on some level realize this ratio is true, a lot of people don’t like talking about it. That said, this post will undoubtedly piss a lot of people off. But on a large scale, when you’re getting multiple requests that you need to filter through, the system works pretty well. On a user-by-user basis, people will have friends that have negative ratios, but they’ll obviously follow them regardless of the ratio. If they’re ratio is close to even, they may be worth looking at on a case-by-case basis. If 3 is greater than 1 (the “negative ratio”) by a large margin, the likelihood that they’re a spammer or marketer is pretty good (and as such, probably someone you don’t want to follow). If 1 is much greater than 3, they most certainly are at least worth looking at. If 1 is greater than 3 (let’s call it a “positive ratio”), it could be worth clicking through to that person’s profile. Next to their profile image, these emails list:ģ – the number of people that user is following One reason why this works so well is that the email notifications you receive now every time you get a new follower put this information front and center. But for regular, non-Hollywood celebrities, the system works remarkably well as a filter. The greater the discrepancy between the two numbers, the more likely each of those is true - to a certain point, since celebrities like Oprah throw this system out of whack. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. But that gets old quickly as well, and inevitably you turn to using the secret ratio that nearly everyone knows (whether they realize it or not) to determine who is worth following back: “Followers” versus “following”. After a couple dozen of those, you may start using more discretion, looking over the person’s profile and their most recent tweets. After all, you’re going to want some tweets in your stream. A notification comes in that someone is following you, and you probably follow them back.
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