The Fallacy of Qwitter

For me, Qwitter is simply convenient. I have people I really hope remain in connection, and when I am alerted by Qwitter someone has left, I at least have the peace of mind to know who it was and don’t have to rummage through all the users to try to figure it out. I have seen people leave that I had a connection with at one time, who I haven’t talked to lately, and it gives me a bit of sadness to see them go… Twitter relationships are as real as you want them to be, and just like people we interact with in person, if you don’t cultivate the relationship it will dwindle and eventually be lost.

There are a few people so dear to me, if they qwit me, I would chase them down and beg their return, or at least try to sort out the issue. A lot of the people that qwit me however, are people I had never followed or created a dialogue with. It doesn’t mean it never would have happened, but some are too impatient to wait for an opening and just want the immediate gratification of return follows, etc.

I use qwitter for the tool that it is… it gives me some info I don’t have to track down, and lets me think about the “why” because there might be some behaviors I want to amend. I don’t like that the results seem aggregated – I am not sure if the “last tweet” that is reported is indeed when the person left. But I don’t plan to qwit qwitter anytime soon. It’s not worth obsessing over, but can be helpful if viewed with the right perspective.

That’s great advice. In my work as an administrator of a forum, I’ve had to learn to let it roll off my back when people unregistered and trust that if I’ve done something really wrong, I’d know it and that it’s likely more to do with them than anything under my control.

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Amber – It’s posts like this that re-affirm exactly why I follow people like you.

“Rather than expending so much energy overanalyzing the few, why not figure out how to bring an incredible experience to the many? What are you doing to make sure that the followers you HAVE are finding something in you, every day? Carpe diem and all that”

Sage words, young lady. Sage words

Gary

Guilty, but now I can’t quit qwitter. I thank you for the advice and won’t take it personal when someone drops out of my conversation.

Hi Amber, Hope Your Holiday was Grand
This reminds me of a saying I heard at a personal growth seminar I participated in years ago, in that one of our greatest fears is “If They Really Knew Me, They Wouldn’t Like Me”

I actually had an online conversion with someone last week about this topic, and my response to her was, I want to do things that make me feel good. If someone elects to quit following, which inevitably happens, if it doesn’t make me feel good, why do I need to know it, I don’t.

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Hi Amber, Hope Your Holiday was Grand
This reminds me of a saying I heard at a personal growth seminar I participated in years ago, in that one of our greatest fears is “If They Really Knew Me, They Wouldn’t Like Me”

I actually had an online conversion with someone last week about this topic, and my response to her was, I want to do things that make me feel good. If someone elects to quit following, which inevitably happens, if it doesn’t make me feel good, why do I need to know it, I don’t.

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Thanks for writing this. Now I finally have a place to point people who’ve been qwit to a cogent argument as to why it likely has no relation to the last thing they tweeted.

People periodically go through their following/follower lists and decide if those people are still delivering value. Whether that value is humor, links, wisdom or something else entirely. If you’ve been qwit, it’s likely that the sum of your tweets is no longer of value to your reader.

Don’t fret. Just keep on truckin’.

This part particularly resonated with me:

I will never be able to make the entire world love me, so I would much rather take the community I’ve built around me – the ones who are there because they wish to be – and deliver something wonderful to them each and every day. Twitter for me is about connecting, sharing, learning.

Why? Because the Twitterverse is another channel of communication to develop the relationships we want to develop. You want connecting, sharing, learning and aren’t shy about it. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy your Twitterstream. The people who wish to be there are the important people, because there’s an understanding of value received. Keep providing value, keep followers. The value received is the prerogative of the follower, and you can only be who you are.

If you compare Twitter to the phone, not everyone is going to return your calls and there’s nothing you can do to know why those people aren’t picking up or calling back. You develop different relationships. You start calling other people (people who pick up & call back) and you move on.

Twitter followers should be the same way. Really, how much energy have you invested into the relationship w/ someone’s who’s qwit? The individual relationship, not the community relationship? If quite a bit, chances are you know why this person’s qwit you or can find out via more direct means. If you haven’t invested that much into it, why the angst when being qwitted?

Anyone can only control two things – what one wants and what one does. Want to provide value, provide it and those who seek it will follow.

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I agree that if someone doesn’t want to follow me, that they shouldn’t, and both our Twitter experiences will be richer. But I decided to check out Qwitter because it claims to let you know what Tweet you left when someone unfollowed you. So in theory, if I see that people are always unfollowing me every time I talk about a certain topic, then I can decide if I want to stop talking about that topic.

But Qwitter has proven to be highly unreliable. It seems to simply pick a time of the day to send me all the unfollows at once, and it simply picks my most recent tweet as being the ‘reason’ why they unfollowed me.

So I don’t see any real value to it at all. And it seems that most of the unfollows for me are coming from people that follow me, then wait a day or 2 to see if I will follow back, then they unfollow again if I don’t.

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Maybe I have become British without looking – no surely not, I still talk to people on trains.

Let’s just be blunt. Someone follows me and I look at their twitter stream and think, no not for me! Now I am the embarrassing position of a) declining their invitation or b) saying nothing. When they withdraw their invitation (qwit), the embarrassment is taken away. I would love to thank them at that point for their kindness and consideration, but that would be perverse. Another application might provide that service!

Equally, if I have done a bit of cold calling and someone doesn’t follow me back – fine, I qwit – don’t want to be a nuisance.

For the people in between – the people in our professional networks – what to do? With Qwitter around, it is so much harder to unfollow discretely. If we bore each other, what are our choices? Reconnect under another handle if things get too bad? Use an app that allows us to group people by importance – I think there is one out there. A favourite tactic it seems is to say you have followed and not do it.

Ah, the foibles of the British!

Dare I suggest – anyone managing their Twitter stream by numbers, and not the enjoyability of the encounter, should switch it off and go ‘cold Turkey’ for a week. I have colleagues who do that from time to time and say they miss it not-one-bit.

PS I did have to reconnect at one point (nothing to do with ducking-and-diving). I reinvited from memory. Some people chose not to reconnect. A few who were sufficiently interesting to follow, I left on my follow list. Others I deleted. I made the choice case-by-case.

Equally people who have spammed me with Alltop, particularly, I ruthlessly deleted.

Nope, we aren’t all stressing because someone qwit.

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Love this. I was never interested in checking out Qwitter (just don’t see the point). But I have had people actually tweet me and say “A follower Qwitted me because I was tweeting with YOU!” Really?! Wow. What is this high school?! If someone who follows someone else qwits them because of me…egads, what can I say?! Um, sorry. (And really, was it because of me or was it the 300 tweets before?!)

The issue I have with Qwitter is from a business perspective. Will companies who are new to Twitter think they need this little tool? Then will they obsess over it just like they do over analytics (that also don’t mean much or tell the whole story)?

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I have absolutely no drive to even check out Quitter. I used to wonder how people even knew that others had unfollowed. I don’t even keep track of the numbers; if someone unfollows me, I’m just not being interesting to them. Unless they block me I can still gain valuable information from them. Honestly, I think I’d develop a serious complex if I knew people were unfollowing.

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Timely post for me to read for I wrote a post about being unfollowed on twitter. I agree with you on EVERYTHING you have said.

Like Michelle has said before me, I have no desire to use Quitter and if someone unfollows me that is their loss.

My issue with social media though is dealing with the sexism on here which I have found to be very alarming. The snide comments by some men that I have experienced has been an eye opener as to whether these individuals have terrible offline communication skills? I don’t know. I have no desire to meet any of these guys.

Thanks again for sharing.

Absolutely!

Follow me, don’t follow me, un-follow me – your call! As I was once told, “what other people think of you is none of your business”…

Personally, since I am relatively new to the entire social media phenomenon, I don’t have much to contribute yet. Even when I begin to increase the level of my contributions, I can easily imagine my style, my sense of humor, my opinions, or all three, not being someone’s “cup of tea”…

A useful Twitter feature, in my opinion, would be the ability to temporarily toggle following a person…being able to “check back in” from time-to-time would be a welcome addition to the current follow/un-follow options.

One of my favorite pieces of tradional wisdom goes something like this:

“Of the people you meet in life, 20% are going to like you, no matter what you do. And 20% are going to dislike you, again, almost no matter what you do. The remaining 60% are going to be mostly indifferent, and focused on their own priorities.

So the key to a happy life is to find the first 20%, and spend as much time with them as possible. Entirely ignore the second 20%, to the degree possible. And be entirely civil to everyone else, encouraging them to be the same to you as they go about their business”.

There’s a lot to that particular bit of wisdom, and it has certainly helped me put things into perspective from time to time.

Keep up the good work, Amber! No matter which category any of us end up in, I’m still going to get a chuckle out of my “Click my junk” coffee mug…

Another great post, Amber. I agree with you completely. I’ll admit I initially jumped onto the Qwitter bandwagon, but noticed myself wondering why this person or that person quit me. That’s when I quit Qwitter.

Qwitter feeds off of people’s inherent desire to be liked and worry when they are not liked. I really don’t see any reason to know why someone quit me on Twitter any more than I need to know why someone quit reading my blog. It’s their prerogative.

As for your Tweets, so far, “I can’t Qwit you.” Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

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Agree with you here.

I”m always fascinated by all the tweets like “I have my 1,000th follower!” and such. I’m not sure what purpose that serves and in fact it seems to be a buzz-kill for any benefit one could simply enjoy from using Twitter.

This greed for fellowship-by-numbers I think is tied to Qwitter. If it’s about numbers and stats, by all means, you should use Qwitter. If you’re interested in ambient connection with interesting people, or if you want what I would call Social RSS, who follows/unfollows you means nothing.

Here’s one way to look at it: just because someone unfollows you, it doesn’t mean you have B.O: sometimes, people don’t share your interest, or maybe they want to pair-down their list to make their experience more intimate.

I can see @Kris’ point, but your rebuttal is strong enough to hold your arguments in place.

I wouldn’t tell people not to use Quitter. Rather, I’d encourage them to evaluate why they use Twitter and if they’ve gotten past Junior High School. Twitter’s pure social: if you’re not sociable (either online or offline), maybe Twitter isn’t your thing.

Smart post, Amber.

Articulate and action-driven post, as always, Amber. Thanks for sharing your perspective. I agree with all of your points about Qwitter and focusing on the ways in which you enrich the people’s lives who REMAIN in your network. I have yet to have anyone ‘qwit’ with whom I’ve developed a relationship; it is typically those who were waiting for a follow back to inflate their numbers or a spam account that was shut down or even something as simple as an errant contact clean up.

The most important thing is NOT to take it personally. Allow the social dynamics of the medium to bring kindred spirits bubbling up to the service while those not suitable for your community [for whatever reason] weed themselves out.

Plus, I think it’s critical to note that Qwitter is only correct about the dropped follower but NOT about which tweet. I know for a fact that people have stopped following me hours before I get my Qwitter email about it, and it merely extracts the last tweet you posted when it queried your follower list. So, people are wasting valuable time obsessing about a tweet that had absolutely nothing to do with the unfollow, and detracting from their true uniqueness of self by altering any behaviors as a result.

As a student of life who is fascinated by human nature, I use services like Qwitter merely for curiousity. It’s a fun exercise in psychology to see how long people wait for a return follow before dropping you, and even more interesting to click through to read their bios. But that should be the extent of it. Any further energy should be spent cultivating the network of people who stick with you day-to-day, and who care about you what you have to say and value what you bring to their community.

Amber, excellent post. The Qwitter phenomenon is useless and fits into our whole obsession with keeping score on Twitter, whether it’s number of followers, Twittergrade, or whatever the latest thing is.

Warren Sukerneks last blog post..Who cares about Qwitter?

Amen.

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Definitely on the same page with you. I dislike Qwitter and what it represents. People definitely get too caught up in the numbers and tools that come out on what seems a daily basis. They’re all in good fun and provides great uses sometimes but personally, it’s just not for me.

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Qwitter removes part of the human element of knowing who your following, and whos following you. Its part of a growing list of tools that are over automating the twitter experience, and distracting from really getting to know folks.

Good share. Like your perspective on this.

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Good food for thought…I see Qwitter as a tool, and I have simply used it like one. Initially, I actually felt hurt, abandoned, but after time, I realized one Tweets to their own flock. Some people make noise that I like to hear, I imagine I don’t appeal to all either. Now it’s those insta-qwits that are curious. Is that when someone follows you, hopes for the same then dumps you? Only to increase their followers, which feels like many friends on FaceBook, which feels like being popular in junior high?

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