Twitter question.

I joined Twitter and I “Follow” a few people. But I have never tweeted anyone. I’ll figure it out someday. But that’s not my question.

Today I clicked on the “+Follow” of someone new and got a message that said, “This user has blocked you from following them.” Wow, it’s a good thing I’m not sensitive. Since I have no history of Tweeting with this person, or any history at all, and have never tweeted anyone in the entire Twitterverse, why would I get a blocked message?

In the long run, since I can still view the persons tweets if I want to, I guess it’s no big deal, but I’m still curious about that message.

That does seem odd. Maybe they mistook you for someone else. I think the only way to block someone on Twitter is to specifically go to their page and set up the block there, so either they must have searched for you or else they saw you in someone else’s list of followers. Is there anything in your profile that is unusual, so that it might have come up on a search, and might put some people off?

Isn’t there a function to ‘block all’, except for specific people that you allow to follow you?

You can protect your account, so that only followers can see your tweets, and people have to be given your permission in order to follow you, but that does not seem to be what randwill is dealing with. The tweets appear to be visible, and the message would not have said “blocked,” it would have said a request for permission had been sent. So far as I can tell (and I have looked at the Help pages) blocking from following can only be done on a case by case basis, and it does not prevent a blocked person from seeing your tweets if they go to your profile page. It just prevents your tweets from appearing in their feed. randwill seems to have been blocked in this way.

When you say that you’ve never tweeted anyone, do you mean that you’ve never @replied to someone, or you haven’t tweeted at all? Anyone who is following a number of people but has 0 tweets themselves gets blocked by me, because that’s indicative of a spammer, but they only get blocked once I get the notification that they’re following me.

And forget “you have to go their page” etc. Any heavy Twitter user uses a client, not the website, and blocking someone is a two-click operation, if that.

Well, ok, but you still have to know that someone exists before you can block them surely? If I am reading the OP right, randwill found himself blocked as soon as he tried to follow this person.

Also, to me the diagnostic sign of a spammer is not that they have no, or very few, tweets (they might just have lost interest, or be new, or lazy, or shy, or whatever), but that they are following hundreds of people (while usually having few if any followers of their own). They follow lots of people in the hope that those they follow will check them out, and click their links. Unless randwill actually is a spammer (in which case he is very ballsy to be asking for help here), I very much doubt that he is following hundreds.

If they are assuming randwill is a spammer just because he has no tweets yet, they are being idiotic.

Why would have a spammer have 0 tweets? Isn’t the point of a spammer, to, well…spam?

No, I’m not a spammer.

I deactivated my previous Twitter account and opened a new one with a different user name and lo and behold, the person’s Twitter I was getting the ‘blocked’ message from allowed me to ‘Follow’. I still have no idea why this would be.

To be honest, I’m still not sure why it matters. As I understand it, Twitter is not about 2-way communication, but about posting what you are doing and allowing others to see this. Since I can see a person’s Tweets without even being a member of Twitter, what benefit does “Following” a person have?

My Twitter homepage shows all of the tweets from all the people that I follow. If I didn’t follow them, I couldn’t see their tweets without going to their Twitter page.

Also you can have tweets of the people you follow sent directly to your cell phone.

Not everyone’s Twitter feed is public. You can set your tweets to private so that only your approved followers can see them:

Sometimes it is. You can tweet at someone (like if I tweeted “@randwill hi!”) and then you can go see who’s been tweeting at you with the @Mention tab, even if they’re not following you. It’s not like email or IM but there definitely is an element of communication if you want to use it for that.

You do, but you can know someone exists because you see someone else mention them, or you see that someone else has started following them or they’ve started following someone else. For example, when my creepy ex created a new account and started requesting to follow people in our mutual social circle (almost all of whom have protected accounts, and a couple of whom asked “hey, anyone know who ___ is?”) I was able to block him preemptively on all of my accounts (I have two that are public.)

All spammers start somewhere. Following more than a handful of people, while not being followed by any or many and having no tweets is a sign of something being hinky.

That may have been the original idea, but that’s far from what Twitter is about now, it became about 2-way (or multi-way) communication from the first month it was in existence. That’s the reason why the @reply exists.

While many spammers were very active tweeters, some had few tweets. They utilized direct messages to spam.

You can only send a DM if the recipient is following you. And what I find is that a lot of people will automatically follow someone back if they see they have a new follower. This opens the door to spammers to DM you.

As far as the OPs question, the person may have closed their follower list to new entrants. I followed one individual who did this. He cleaned out people he didn’t want following him and then locked down the account. In order to re-tweet his posts, you had to physically cut and paste into a new tweet.