Twitter Etiquette

I had an experience on Twitter yesterday that keeps playing in my mind like an old ’60 toon that I can’t seem to shake. I normally get lots of tweets telling me to link to some site and use their software to get “tons of followers.” Twitter is chocked full of people pimping this kind of software from a variety of sites.

Normally when I see a message like that, I click on that person’s profile and un-follow them, because the last thing I want is someone filling up my twitter with that garbage. But yesterday that message came from someone I’m familiar with, another published writer. I was a bit intrigued by why a writer would be pushing that garbage instead of something related to books, so I clicked on her profile to see how many followers she had piled up with this software she was so hot over. She had slightly over three-hundred followers.

Now my definition of “tons of followers” falls somewhere in the ten-thousand and up range, so when I saw her low number of followers I assumed she had either not used the software she was pimping, or it simply didn’t work as she claimed. Neither option made sense to me so I sent her a message asking why her numbers were so low if this software was supposedly so good.

She shot back a rather snide sounding response that she “didn’t know Twitter was a competition.”

Her response has bugged me all morning. Of course she’s right, it’s not a competition. But if you’re going to litter my, and three-hundred-plus other follower’s, mailbox with spam that either doesn’t work or you haven’t used, then the least you can do is be civil. Don’t you think?

Anyway, her latest book, which had made its way to the top of my to-review stack, is now at the bottom of the stack. Am I being infantile? Probably, and I’m not proud of that action, but I think it’s best for me to give myself enough time to forget about such rudeness before I read her novel and write a review.