{"id":242,"date":"2009-03-02T08:13:07","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T08:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/sakufu\/2009\/03\/02\/block_first_ask\/"},"modified":"2009-03-02T08:13:07","modified_gmt":"2009-03-02T08:13:07","slug":"block_first_ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/2009\/03\/02\/block_first_ask\/","title":{"rendered":"Block first, ask questions later (if at all)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t believe in the idea that you should follow everyone on Twitter who follows you. This topic is debated quite a bit, but that idea just doesn&#8217;t suit me personally. My policy on whom I follow on Twitter is pretty simple:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> I know you.\n<li> I know of you.<\/ul>\n<p>Beyond that, I can&#8217;t say I&#8217;m terribly interested. Yes, that flies in the face of the idea of &quot;social media&quot;, but anyone who knows me can attest that my sociability has its limits.<\/p>\n<p>I also have some very draconian criteria of whom I allow to follow me. I actually tend to block a lot of people, most of whom seem to gamble on the idea that if they follow me, I will follow them back. Here&#8217;s what determines when I block Twitter followers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> <strong>A following-to-follower ratio more than 2:1<\/strong>. Just now, I blocked a guy who was following more than 900 people but had only 169 followers himself. That rose a flag to me that he was trolling for another follower. I may let you slide if you have a manageable following count of fewer than 100.\n<li> <strong>Following or follower counts in the thousands<\/strong>. I don&#8217;t care if you think you can pay attention that many people. You can&#8217;t. I&#8217;m doing you a favor by blocking you. I cannot in good conscience contribute to your attention deficit disorder. Also, I&#8217;m egoistical enough not to want to be lost in a stream of thousands of posts.\n<li> <strong>SPAM<\/strong>. I do have to say Twitter has been very good at targeting mass followers.<\/ul>\n<p>Right now, I&#8217;m following 40 people, and I&#8217;ve got 50 people following me. I didn&#8217;t block a few people because their profiles indicated some common interests, and maybe something I say will have some relevance to them. Only they could tell you.<\/p>\n<p>But my stringent following and follower policies pretty much spares me from all the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.austin360.com\/blogs\/content\/shared-gen\/blogs\/austin\/digitalsavant\/entries\/2008\/12\/18\/what_not_to_twe.html\">annoyances<\/a> other Twitter users may experience. In the end, I use Twitter in a way it was probably intended &#8212; as a means to communicate with a tight social circle. I like some of the ideas that have bootstrapped on to that premise, but I&#8217;m not a true believer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t believe in the idea that you should follow everyone on Twitter who follows you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia-social"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-3U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}