When I first found out about Twitter, it felt like I'd discovered a delicious new toy. Wheee! Look at all these cool people I can follow! Look at all these news sites, and editor sites, and snark sites, all MINE! MINE!!! True, the NASA site never followed me back, but what cared I? I was young (shut up) and innocent, and what did I know of comparing number of followers versus number of followees? Zilch is what I knew. I just merrily went on my way, tweeting my clever little tweets when I felt like it. And if anyone happened to follow me, I would look at his or her site, and see whether or not it interested me, and decide accordingly whether or not to follow back.
You're guffawing by now, right? Because of course, along with every other sentient organism, you've known for eons that Twitter is ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS! Forget what you like to read! Forget what you like to tweet! Think only of being followed by more than you follow! Many, many more! Amass followers as if they were all recruits to your personal army! Follow back ANYONE who follows you, no matter whether all they tweet is incredibly stupid and insipid quotes from their own stupid and insipid books! (Serious question: those are trolls, right?) And if idiots follow you and you (having now been properly trained) reflexively follow them back, and then for their own mysterious troll reasons they UNfollow you, then you immediately UNfollow them back! See how it all works? The vast, terrible conspiracy? Whether or not you ever tweet again is utterly irrelevant! So is what you tweet! Somehow, the trolls will find you and thrust themselves among your cache of followers, and life on Twitter will be Good! Trust me! I have been to the Twitter mountain and drunk the Twitter Kool Aid, and I know what I'm talking about!
So, the other day I scrolled ruthlessly through the list of sites I follow. I deleted most of the ones that don't follow me back, except for the few I can't live without. I deleted the trolls whom I never sought out in the first place but I followed back anyway, only to be dealt the further indignity of being unfollowed (????) So that now, I am proud to report to Big Twit Brother, I only follow 239 sites and have a whopping 146 followers. This is the most acceptable ratio I've ever been able to claim. Now, any editor who looks me up on social media and finds my Twitter account will not blanch, gag, and instantly blackball me forever. I approach follower/followee parity and, please God, will someday achieve it if I keep my eye on the ball.
So. Wanna follow me? I'm @unpubYA. I promise I'll follow you back!!!
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