Networking

Why I Don’t #F4F

It’s no longer about reciprocity — if it ever was — “follow for follow” is just a scam

Photo by Gil Ribeiro on Unsplash

Once upon a time, reciprocity was a good thing. But I never did the whole “follow for follow” because that’s a fast-paved road to Hell and always has been.

The only followers online who matter are those who do one or more of the following:

• Become friends;
• Really read and comment on your writing;
• Help you solve a problem;
• Buy your books or other products;
• Promote your writing, books, or other products.

If you think it’s merely a numbers game, you are a fool marketing to fools. Most of the folks “winning” the follow-for-follow game are merely building a “following” in order to appear more popular or successful than they really are. No one is talking about them. No one is reading their stories or buying whatever nonsense they’re selling. No one is leaving them five star reviews or promoting them to anyone they don’t hate. The only thing these people are likely to sell is a course on how to appear more successful than you really are. Few have the work ethic or talent to become “paid influencers,” let alone successful writers, inventors, or “thought leaders.”

Back in the 1990s, a certain online service known for giving out free “drink coasters” claimed over a million users. Few realized that every user ID generated on one of those drink coasters — CDs — counted as a “user,” whether they ever logged into the service or not. It’s still around, though I’m not sure why. Maybe because you still use one of its old email addresses.

Another could afford to leak money like a paper boat on the high seas because it was an advertising vehicle for its parent companies — one of the first ad-supported services, the first to offer a graphical user interface, and a model for today’s social media platforms. It was cheap — not free, at least not at first — and helped to kill the competition. Most people couldn’t name the platform, today; it ceased operations in the 1990s.

Way back in the 1990s, I learned how to write chatbots. I am not a programmer, but I could probably design a decent IRC chatbot to this day. (Yes, IRC is still around. Again, not sure why, but hey… it’s still there. IRC was fun, but I haven’t logged onto it in over five years.) Now, there are whole botnets talking — to each other — on every platform. I made one on Twitter — just to see if I could, and all it ever did was retweet Librarians and Library news. And then I forgot where I put it, so it may be out there tweeting — X’ing? — still. The only people who can stop the large botnets from spamming and scamming and skimming money from platforms like Facebook, X, and Medium — or your favorite bank, while they’re at it — are the (probably underfunded and underappreciated) IT and Security departments of those companies. There’s not much we can do beyond the following:

• Report and Block; then
• Tell your friends; and, finally
• Ignore them.

Be very wary of who you follow back.

I wrote this comment in 2022:

[embed]I had over 700 followers from a single comment left in 2015 or so. "Follow for follow" through, is useless. Lots of people follow me, in hopes that I'll follow back. I will - if they're…hollyjahangiri.medium.com

Unfortunately, scammers are getting smarter — and I have revised this general rule about following back the people who have paid memberships, as some of the scammers now pay for one or more memberships just for this express purpose. They won’t continue to do so, once they’ve achieved their goals, and they probably have a small network of bots (possibly fellow scammers) who will “read” their posts and keep the money in-house, so to speak.

I have about 6,200 followers — many of them have left the site, and many more are simply hoping I’ll blindly follow them back. They aren’t reading. They aren’t commenting.

I earned all of $0.15 last month. I’m not complaining — if you are reading this, I haven’t posted anything new in a while. I’m sorry. But for the hundreds of followers I’ve accumulated, recently, I have just one bit of advice: let your fellow members know you care. Offer up your two cents’ worth of thoughts in the comments.

And none of this boilerplate “great post” crap. Engage in a little conversation to show we’re worth your time and effort.

I’ll come take a look at yours (eventually) and see if you’re actively writing and not just throwing a bunch of virtual spaghetti at a wall. Do you have to write Pulitzer-worthy prose? NO!! Few of us do. I don’t care. Just be human and interesting. We can tell when you’re “phoning it in” or paraphrasing the usual bland blog posts found dead on the internet superhighway, as we once called this thing. Hear me on this: We can tell.

I’d rather read imperfect writing than canned or artificially-intelligent prose from a person of questionable ethics. I apologize in advance for needing a bit more proof than a “follow,” these days.