A slew of Twitter users posted this morning the disappearance of significant portions of followers and followees from their accounts. Has Twitter lost swaths of user data? Or is it the side effect of ousting "aggressive followers," who Twitter equates with spammers? Are followers worth much?
A quick, church-sermon-esque Twitter search on "
Twenty or so disappeared from my own account.
On Monday, founder Biz Stone published notice of
According to that post:
"To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following too many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review."
While the spam initiative has some interesting timing in relation to this morning's phenomenon, it was clear early that not only spammy followers were lost, but also friends. Anna, who goes by
Pulver, too, indicated some larger problem. "I seemed to have lost 400 people who followed and 700 people who followed me," he said via email. "I'm still at 5,000+ 'real people' so maybe that is ok. I don't know yet who got removed by accident and how many of these people where designated as spam.
"This issue is a sign of a bigger problem/challenge/learning that is ongoing."
Pulver also said that when Twitter launched in 2006, the founders "could not have appreciated the space they would be filling in the life of others and the unintended consequences that would prevail." He said this was part of the challenge of maintaining a "real enough time (RET) communication network."
Stone responded to request for comment saying the data loss was not because of recent spam efforts, but instead is a bug. "The followers/followees bug is unrelated to our spam initiatives," he said. "We worked on it last night but we'll be looking more into the follower bug today."
There is a broader question here that may be very difficult to define. In April of this year, Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron briefly put his Twitter account up
Posed the same question, Stone had not yet responded by press time.
Twitter Bug Torches Follower Lists
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