[lrichardson]

Interestingly enough, I had just about the opposite experience when I signed up for twitter.

I created my account around 2 yrs ago I think... maybe a little longer.

When I signed up, I remember the onboarding process being a bit similar in terms of requiring you to follow at least 5 people, except for me, the users it listed out were incredibly relevant.

It was to the point where I almost felt like my privacy had been breached. My understanding was that basically twitter looks at the IP address (or maybe it's with cookies?) of everyone viewing every page on the internet that has a twitter "tweet" button on it.

Since I read lots of blogs, articles, etc. around the web... twitter then had at the very least a starting point for the users that I would be interested in (based on the tweet buttons they put on their page).

Perhaps the code was different back then, but I remember the initial follow recommendations being really good.