Churn

If you've developed applications for Twitter like QwaiderBlogTwitter that has provisions to follow your followers and keep track of their information (People change names all the time, especially people you tweet for, keeping track is inevitable), and having provisions to follow your followers (as a courtesy). You will feel what I say

Ever since I created my "Friend Follower" component, I've been faced with 2 major issues that required a lot of work (and workarounds). Especially when I don't want to be bundled with the "Aggressive followers" (those who follow everyone overnight)

For example, there are people who post pornographic material, now I'm not really interested in following those

Then there are "the churn" who follow you until you follow them back and then unfollow you. (Don't confuse these with people who follow you, find you uninteresting then unfollow you)

To work around these issues, I had to create a pornographic detector (Now I know what couple of my PhD friends wasted their time "researching") and a churn detector (among tons of other things). So now the AI knows understands and does not follow pornographic tweeters,

I've also built the functionality to detect and unfollow the "churn" users but the question for me and for everyone is, Should I? The simple answer here is the right one. Yes, I should.

Overtime these "churn" become a big problem as they cause your numbers (following/follower) to become imbalanced. You'll end up following so many out of courtesy when that kindness is not being reciprocated.

Besides following these exposes you to all their tweets, it becomes rather boring to follow them. Don't get me wrong, I mean you might have some friends who will simply not follow you. Or some celebrity that will be unlikely to notice you, let alone follow you. You might want to keep those.

So, off I go, deleting a bunch of churn :) I suggest, you do the same. There are tools to do this for you, but they don't distinguish between a friend or celebrity. So be careful while using those. For me, my "friends" are never at risk, I mark them "Friends" in my database. So they don't get mixed up with the churn.

TIP: to know who's following you, hover your mouse over the name, weight for the menu to show up, click the little Gear icon. If you find a "Direct message to XXXX" then they're following you. If that option is missing. Then they're not following.