twitter fail blog

Hey handsome, you want some company?

What do you mean, a “date?”

Yeah, you know, follow me and I’ll follow you. It’ll be nice.

Follow you? What does that cost?

Not much. Just read my tweets.

Is that all? Are you sure?

Well, if you want a little more interaction, I’ll send you some spam, and DM you an affiliate link or two. Nothing big. A girl’s gotta eat, you know, and leopard-skin spandex doesn’t come cheap.

Okay, this is a bust. You’re under arrest for #followerwhoring.

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That’s how we imagine it going down, and in that little daydream, there’s lots of pistol-whipping and other virtual police brutality.

We were first made aware of the term #followerwhoring when Honorary Fail Bird Handler @Bytor asked us if we’d help popularize it. For all future twitter generations, this term was coined on August 17, 2009:

The definition of a #followerwhore is: Tweeple who follow zillions of others (usu. by #search search, not because they like you) hoping you follow back sans thinking. We instantly agreed with this definiton, partly because we hate spammers, but mostly because he used the word “sans” in a sentence. That’s classy stuff.

You can follow our example and call out the #followerwhores. It’s a great way to express your frustration at the frequent appearance of the fail whale. All that spam and follower whoring uses up resources that overload twitter and bog it down when the rest of us are trying to connect with our buds.

He did have one point of clarification (and again we agree with him, because we like agreeing with smart people): There’s two classes of #followerwhores. The first is the evil spammer a-holes we’ve already discussed. The second group, in a misguided attempt to be loved, follow a bunch of people, so that lots of people will follow them. Just like the girl in high school who is popular for all the wrong reasons (Hi Marcia!), these clueless twitter sluts are being used right back.

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