Twitter, Pownce Fight Spam With New ‘Follower’ Limits
In an effort to fight spam, both Twitter and Pownce recently started limiting the amount of people any user can follow. Both services seem to have capped the maximum number of people you can follow at 2,000.
As social services like Twitter, Pownce and FriendFeed edge closer to the mainstream, the amount of spam on the sites is inevitably on the rise. All of these sites use the “follow” paradigm to construct relationships between friends, and spam accounts are known for following thousands of users but having few followers themselves. By restricting the number of people you can follow, the sites are also restricting the spammer’s reach and theoretically discouraging abuse.
Although Twitter itself hasn’t published an actual number, some users have run into it already, and the service did recently hint that limits exist:
Our challenge is to curb this type of behavior without interfering with non-spammy users — some of whom may just be very enthusiastic followers. What is a reasonable number of people to follow, anyway? Most users may have a hard time finding 500 accounts they are interested in — while others would think a limit of 10,000 is too low.
You may be thinking 2,000 people is excessive enough that there won’t be much backlash. But, as with similar limits on Facebook and elsewhere, extremely prolific folks like Robert Scoble aren’t happy with the limits. However, in at least some cases Twitter appears to bend the rules — political campaigns, CNN and even some web celebrities appear to be allowed to exceed the 2,000 limit.
And to be clear, Twitter’s limit seems to depend on how many people follow you. In other words, if you have 2,000 followers, you can in turn exceed the limits and follow more than 2,000 people. So, demonstrate the community is interested in you and you can go over the limit.
For the average user, 2,000 seems like a perfectly acceptable limit; the only problem I see is that there’s nothing to stop the spammers from simply creating more accounts. Perhaps, in addition to setting limits, Twitter needs some sort of “report this person” link so the community can help flag the spammers.
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