I don’t follow a lot of people on Twitter, but I still sometimes have
trouble deciding whether the accounts I’m following are worth it. Folks
with much longer follow lists presumably have even harder going.
Enter The Twit
Cleaner, a (sadly, as of late 2013, defunct) service that scans your
follow list and automatically categorizes the behavior of everyone on
it. They have some straightforward heuristics for deciding whether
someone is worth following, mostly documented in their FAQ:
Q. How are the (potential) bad guys broken down?
A. The possible categories are:
Dodgy - spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links
etc
Absent - No updates in a month, or fewer than 10
tweets.
Repetitive - High numbers of duplicate tweets or
links
Flooding - So high volume you can’t see anyone
else
Non-Responsive - No interaction & those that follow
back < 10%
Little New Content - Retweeting lots or just posting
quotes
This is generally a good scheme, but its focus on conversational use
of Twitter means that it misidentifies a few types of legitimate account
as unsavory. I think a few special case categories would go a long way
to making the service’s advice more useful.
Announcement channels
These are the Twitter equivalent of a news ticker—they broadcast
announcements related to something, but they don’t converse with people
(as a general rule). The Cleaner dings them as dodgy behavior:
tweeting the same links all the time
and/or not interactional:
hardly follow anyone.
Examples include @NBCOlympics, @CDCemergency, @asym, @Astro_Soichi, and
(ironically) @TwitCleaner
itself (the problem here appears to be public @somebody, your report
is ready at
directed tweets when direct messages fail).
These can probably be machine-identified as extreme outliers in
follower-to-followed ratio. @asym
and @Astro_Soichi don’t
follow anyone; @NBCOlympics and @CDCemergency follow less
than 0.1% of their follower numbers. @TwitCleaner likes to follow
users of the service, though; maybe they should just whitelist
themselves? Also, if Twitter-verified users are
not already whitelisted (I wasn’t able to tell from my own report),
perhaps they should be.
Lurkers
Lurkers are the
opposite of announcement channels: they just read Twitter, they never
post anything. Lurking is a time-honored tradition on the Internet and
people shouldn’t be penalized for it. I have several lurkers on my
follow list just on the off chance that they might start posting in the
future.
Accounts that have never posted at all should be distinguished from
accounts that post rarely. (The latter are often spammers. Lately
Twitter itself has gotten a lot better about finding and banning
spammers, but they still turn up now and then.)
Fictional character accounts
There are any number of fictional characters who regularly use
Twitter—that is, their authors write and post tweets under their names,
usually to provide a bonus story line, or to implement the fourth
wall mail slot. Examples include @Othar of Girl Genius and the entire cast
(caution: mildly NSFW; @pintsize0101 consistently links to egregiously
NSFW images of the where’s my brain bleach
variety) of Questionable Content.
Fictional characters may absent themselves for long periods because the
bonus story line is on hold (Othar recently didn’t post anything for
four months but is now back) and might not follow anyone but other
characters from the same fictional world (the QC cast does this); both
things get them unfairly dinged by the Cleaner.
It probably isn’t possible to identify fictional accounts in a
mechanical way. However, you could pick out cliques
in the follow graph, sets of accounts that are followed by many but that
follow no one but each other, as deserving human attention. If Twitter
implemented some sort of account-labeling scheme that would let the
people behind the curtain mark accounts as fictional characters, that
would be awesome.
