The thing I absolutely can’t stand above all else about social networks is their abuse as status symbols. Jack has 1000 more followers than Jill, so Jack must be imbued with some quality of awesomeness that exceeds anything Jill could muster on a good day, right? And, people go to all lengths to obtain their little avatar-sized badges of honor, even lengths as disgusting as enlisting a service such as GatherFollowers.com (link intentionally omitted) to aid them in their quest.
GatherFollowers.com is essentially a pyramid scheme built on the Twitter API. Anyone can sign up free, and GatherFollowers.com promises that you’ll get more followers. The catch? First, you must follow their VIPs. VIPs on GatherFollowers.com are users who actually pay for this disgusting little service, and in return, they are followed by any normal user that joins and aren’t required to follow anyone themselves.
Oh, there’s one more catch, a big, big, catch: you grant GatherFollowers.com the right to post “promotional” items (read: ads) to your Twitter feed every 4 hours (!). VIP members are, of course, excluded from this obligation.
If you’re just that pathetic and your self-worth is so intrinsically tied to your follower count that you would join some service and follow a bunch of people you don’t know and don’t care about just so you can add a few more badges of honor to your Twitter profile, I could halfway understand that. But, to let, nay grant some 3rd-party the ability and right to post ads to your Twitter feed in exchange is complete madness. And, guess what? If I’m following you and I see this crap come through my Twitter feed, I won’t be following you any more.
Somewhere along the line, people have lost the concept of the purpose of webapps like Twitter: it’s a microblogging service, and just like a blog, it should contain items of worth or at least something personal. I’d take 10,000 Tweets about how you just brushed your teeth over one sell-out ad. More than that, imagine the sheer insanity of this kind of thing if it were applied to an actual blog. Would you seriously allow some 3rd-party the right to add whatever post they’d like to your blog every four hours in exchange for more subscribed readers? Not just no, but hell no. So why suffer the same thing on your Twitter feed?
Anyway you cut it, this kind of thing is pathetic to the Nth degree, and if I happened to catch you before you signed up for this sad excuse for a web service and before you click that shiny “Login” button, think about just one thing: how many real followers are you going to lose in the hopes of obtaining a bunch more meaninglessly anonymous followers?
