No one likes spammers, and that’s the reason why Twitter decided to cut the number of accounts that you can follow on Twitter daily.
You can now follow a maximum of 400 accounts, and when Gizmodo reported the news, they put it as if it’s not such a big change from 1000 accounts which was the initial allowed number of accounts you could have followed daily.
But they reported the following as an update to their original article:
“A Twitter spokesperson directed us to the following tweet thread by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, on why it picked a daily 400 follower limit. Essentially, it’s the magic number that eliminates the most spam for normal users, without burdening businesses that need a slightly higher rate.”
So, why 400 per day, and not 100? Or 58? Or 17? In short, we found that 400 is a reasonable limit that allows people to follow the accounts they’re interested in each day while stopping the most spam.
— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) April 8, 2019
Limiting the “follower churn” practice
According to Twitter, the platform is trying to limit the practice called “follower churn.” This is when an account will follow and then unfollow a large number of people in order to try and boost its own follower count.
Only bots and spammers will go around following 1,000 people on a daily basis, that’s for sure.
Twitter’s Help Center reveals the message that users will be getting once they reached the allowed number of accounts they can follow:
“You are unable to follow more people at this time.”
It seems that this number will not apply to verified accounts. If you have got the blue check mark, then you can still follow up to 1,000 accounts each day, and the reason is that Twitter knows that you are not a spammer, as reported by Gizmodo.
Twitter also limits the total number of accounts that you can follow to 5,000.
Gizmodo finishes the article in a pretty harsh way: “This is all nice, and part of Twitter’s larger effort to shift its reputation as a garbage, anxiety-inducing cesspool of a website. That includes tests to hide awful replies to tweets, author labels for longer conversations, and notifications that indicate when a reported tweet has violated Twitter’s rules.” Well, no comment on this one.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
