[honksillet]

Re-IPO twitter was all about growth. There 1.0 API made making a spambot ridiculously easy. 1.1 is only a slight improvement. One problem is that line between real and bot has been blurred. There are many real accounts out there whose owner have attach bots to them. I frequently get bot follows only to see that I have been unfollowed in short order. The obvious hope is that I will reciprocate the follow and not notice the unfollow. But often these are coming from real accounts. One of the downsides of being a programmer and being interested in CS type things is that a the twitter circles I would be interested are loaded with these semi-faux/semi-real accounts. The result is that the spam to signal ratio is much too high.

[r3bl]

I'm just using a simple tactic: if the user follows more than 10k users, that means that he has no interest in my tweets and will probably never interact with me.

So, if I like what he is really doing, sure, I might follow him back. Otherwise, no way.