billpalmer.net

Twitter made an interesting policy change announcement this week. Users can choose to keep their updates private and approve follower requests on a case by case basis, but this has always been pretty much a two-way street. For instance, if your updates are protected but you start following me (my account always has been and always will be publicly available), that means I can automatically follow you back without having to get specific approval. It always made sense to me; if you want to see my updates, it seems only fair that I get to start seeing yours.

But according to their blog, Twitter has reversed that policy, meaning that even if you start following my updates, I'll still have to specifically request to be allowed to see yours if you keep them protected. For someone like me who follows nearly everyone back if they're an actual human and not some kind of automated regurgitator (I have 2887 followers and I follow 2765 people), this is a problem for me. Why? Because generally speaking, the only followers I don't follow back are the autobots. I'm not saying that they're not of value, and in fact we'll soon be launching one for iProng Magazine due to public demand, but it's not what I signed up for on Twitter.

So my problem is, if you follow me and I have to decide whether I want to request to follow you back without first being able to see any of your posts, how I am I supposed to know whether you're a real person or an autobot? I can look at your last five posts and figure that out immediately, but if I'm limited to having to make a guess based solely on your username and follower ratio, I'm going to guess wrong sometimes and pollute my already-crowded Twitter stream with stuff I don't want. The real trouble comes with the fact that some autobots actually go so far as to make it appear that they're real human user accounts by using a person's name, a stock photo, and even throwing in the occasional random human-sounding post in amongst all the automated links.

Twitter's blog makes the case for someone who wants to keep their updates private but want to follow a legitimate autobot such as @CNN. That seems fair, as someone who's concerned about privacy may not want to expose their personal day to day activities to the anonymous face behind an account representing a multi-billion dollar corporation. But that just tells me that whether anyone wants to make it official or not, there are now two different classes of Twitter accounts: humans and autobots. And before this starts to sounds like a good-vs-evil Transformers sequel, I want to reiterate that I don't have a problem with legitimate autobots. I just don't want to follow any myself, and I certainly don't want to waste anyone's time by following them by accident.

My point is that instead of dealing with the automated accounts in a way that makes it more difficult for us real people to use the service effectively, how about creating a separate class for the automated accounts? I really don't know how that would work, and seeing how Twitter has much bigger and more immediate fish to fry, I'm not sure I even want them to try. But I know how I'm going to deal with it. For the time being, anyone who follows me with a protected account and then doesn't allow me to follow them back within a few days, I'm going to block them. Those folks will still be able to see my update history (as can any non-Twitter user) simply by viewing my page, but I don't want them following me from one minute to the next. Which is big for me, because I've never blocked anyone. I'm not trying to take a stand, not trying to protest the policy change. I'm just not comfortable with the idea of anyone following my updates if I can't see theirs.

Any other Twitter users having as hard of time wrapping their heads around this one as I am? Anyone think Twitter should look into creating a separate class of user accounts whose sole purpose is to post automated links to a certain site's content? I'm not sure if I do, but this week's policy reversal has gotten me reconsidering.