I created a new Twitter account last night (@folgian), with the admitted goal of mocking those who follow tens of thousands of people by following EVERYONE I can on Twitter, and was immediately prompted by Twitter to add all my gmail friends.
Which I did. I had over 1,000 gmail contacts with Twitter accounts. A good start. I was well on my way to following 50+ million people.
Twitter then recommended other people I might want to follow.
I gladly obliged to follow the 459 people it recommended that I follow.
When I woke up this morning, my account was already suspended.
Thanks twitter.
I looked up their rules on following people. Evidently, you’re only allowed to follow 2,000 people. At that point, you can’t follow any more people until about 2,000 people are following you. Twitter doesn’t explicitly state what the rules are, but they are something to that effect.
The rules about aggressive following and follow churn still apply. In addition, every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.
When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you.
When you reach a daily or total limit and we show you an error message, you’ve hit a technical limit imposed to limit egregious behavior by spam accounts and to prevent strain on the site. These are just the technical limits for your account; in addition, you are prohibited from aggressive following behaviors.
These behaviors may result in account suspension, regardless of your account’s technical ratio.
Odd that I’m suspended at about 1,500 people, and purely by following Twitter’s recommendations – follow your gmail friends, follow these recommended power users.
