If you’re on Twitter, then it’s happened to you. It’s par for the course and no big deal, but it happened to me seven times this week and I am baffled.
Yep, I’m talking about that wacky random follower who appears and then disappears two days later.
Like I said, it happens and is no big deal. I’ve been hovering around 80 followers for a while now and, with the exception of elder son and goodly cigar folk, most of those are authors, publishers or other literary types. A fair number of those are follow-backs from people I have chosen to follow. Some are folks whose work I have reviewed or met out there in the MeatSpace. Still others appeared seemingly from nowhere, but I can see that we have things in common. Hell, as of yesterday, I’ve even got a dog following me!
It is the truly random follower/unfollower whose feed has absolutely nothing in common with mine that befuddles me. There is one part of the whole follow/unfollow randomly hoping to amass an army of click-happy minions program that I just don’t understand.
I’m a mathematician by training and understand the numbers game all too well. That’s not it.
I make my living with technology. I know that it is cheap to play that numbers game. That’s not it.
It isn’t even that these people ignore the lessons for social media laid down by Esther Dyson back when Mark Zuckerberg was still in junior high.
It doesn’t matter to me that their message is so devoid of value that they just don’t care who hears it.
I don’t understand the unfollow.
It’s like breaking up when we never even dated.
Ouch!
