Arrington Wants To Stroke Me, My Ego That Is
Aug 11 2008 
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While she was not looking, I figured a little guest blogging by Corvida’s partner-in-crime, IdoNotes (and on Twitter) was required. So here I am.
Mainly when Michael Arrington offers to stroke my ego in a recent TechCrunch article. The main point of his article was the following, and is the focus of my rant in return:
We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed…. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.
I really like watching what people have to say, if they say something important. But the idea of following you in any manner if your content is not worthwhile to me personally, defeats the whole purpose. I don’t follow the RSS of any person who reads my stream. So what is with the pressure of returning a follow for Twitter and FriendFeed? We are suddenly back in elementary school where you got upset if you did not get the most Valentine’s Day cards.
Michael says the system becomes unusable when you follow too many people. Heck yes it does. Amazingly worthless. I honestly follow about 15% of those that follow me and 5% of those that don’t follow me. Do I cry when I don’t get a return follow? No, I do one better. I have all notifications that I have been followed going stright to the trash and I don’t look (disclaimer: I had to for this article to get the percentages). So the I have no clue or idea. Right now I could have had not one single follower left. Would that stop me from blasting out awesomesauce content on Twitter all day? Nope.
So this whole plan of adding a feature to any of the services: micro-blogging, lifestreaming, aggregation, tuck-and-roll, etc is insane. If you are not family, a great freind or someone I owe tons of money too, you better darn well have good content a good percentage of the time.
Do I expect every person to only put out content all day and not have a personality? Nope, I expect the personality to help make all the content and commentary fun. So I give the big veto to ego stroking someone with ‘fake’ follows. Stroke them right.
Oh, you can stroke me all over the place. Here, here, here, here, here, here and really here just for starters.
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Ha, very true..what people need to realize is that when you follow content, it's because you like the content. Not because you want people to follow back. So the old saying “quality over quantity” should apply
Any social service like this needs some sort of grouping or tiered setup for your main page. I don't mind friending nearly everyone but it's hard to find the needles in the haystacks when the people I actually know start posting important stuff.
Right now I'm always sifting through my twitter page and thinking “Bah, him again? I don't even know that guy! Where's the unfollow button?” My fault for participating in a twitter “love-in” account swap at Problogger.net I guess.
That's the reason I don't follow many people. I only frequent 10 blogs. Too many will be exhausting I don't need to live a life.
I only follow those that will value-add my interests and i believe this applies to most people.
I think we all forgot the true meaning of following. Many follow blindly a high traffic blogs in the hope of getting return traffic. We should just follow something that is of interest to us. Don't just follow for the sake of increasing traffic to your blog.
It's amazing you got his attention. You're lucky to have access to so many amazing people.