Twitter Follower Authenticity

The cluster centers on skepticism about the value and genuineness of Twitter follower counts, with discussions questioning bots, spammers, inflated numbers, and follower-to-following ratios as indicators of quality.

📉 Falling 0.2x Startups & Business
3,647
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#5005
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Keywords

OP HN YouTube github.com PR hashtags.org followers twitter following follow tweets tweet accounts spammers blogging accelerating

Sample Comments

m3kw9 Jul 5, 2023 View on HN

Who knows how much the follower counts are inflated

spot Aug 26, 2009 View on HN

why wouldn't you follow someone who has more followers than followees? i follow about 20 folks and am followed by 400. those 20 already tweet so much i am not sure i want more traffic than that. what does that say about the quality of my output?

trasz May 23, 2022 View on HN

That's an interesting suggestion from someone who's majority of followers are bots.

rkon Apr 26, 2011 View on HN

Having 24k Twitter followers isn't much of an indicator when you're following 19k of them... that's the same strategy spammers use.

SuperChihuahua Apr 19, 2012 View on HN

Display how many followers your company has on Twitter. Some of those followers are probably spammers - but it doesn't matter short-term.

piffey Aug 11, 2012 View on HN

Can anyone explain what the benefit is of having hundreds of useless followers? Is there some reputation system on Twitter I'm missing?

freyfogle Mar 2, 2025 View on HN

How many of the twitter followers are live humans?

mittermayr Oct 27, 2014 View on HN

I just checked them out, they at least have a lot more followers than they follow, so this usually is a good sign. although, unfortunately, they have tweets from about 8k people on their timeline, so it's gonna be tricky to get their attention in all that noise.

lost_tourist Feb 9, 2023 View on HN

I got a weird message about "you are following people too much, only 4000 allowed" . I think I follow like 30 people or so lol. They are definitely looking into limiting people who aren't cash cows. They are overlooking the thing that makes twitter twitter, but keep accelerating that spiral.

hawkice Jan 25, 2017 View on HN

Many people on Twitter have fewer followers before they tweet anything.