Okay, that's a lie. It's you.
See, like all too many a new Twitter user, when we started this great social-media adventure, we were eagerly clicking the follow button on any anme we recognized and any account that followed us. In our youthful naivete, we ended up with a follow list full of spammers, scammers and old-fashioned idiots. So now it's time to clean house. Here's a list of the six types of Twits we'll be dumping. May they never darken our feed again!
Make Money Quick!!!ers: You can identify these idiots at a glance. Their usernames are all variations on Money4You and GetRichNow23, and all they ever tweet are links to sign up to their affiliate program, e-newsletter or teleseminar. If we'd taken a minute to look at the bullshit they were tweeting, we never would have followed them in the first place. Seriously, the best use of the Internet they can come up with is turning it into a giant pyramid scheme? Assholes. From now on, anyone with the words wealth, fortune, money, rich and/or quick in their username are off limits. Sorry about that, Rich Fortune: Your unfortunate name means we can never be friends (online).
Cam Whores: The prevalence of the CamWhore online has made us inherently mistrust anyone with a hot girl as their icon. That's just wrong -- hot girls can be legitimate users of Twitter, too! All these "girls" (who are really bots) ever tweet are links to their pay site, links to their trojan-filled free site and faux-provocative tweets about how horny they are (with a link to their pay and/or trojan site included). If your Twit icon is a hot girl, we'll be looking extra hard at your feed to make sure you aren't a CamWhore -- and if you include the word Cam in your name, you are gone.
Link Blasters: Link Blasters are the third option in the trifecta of sucky, spammy, probable bots on Twitter. They typically tweet tons of links to various topics, all in huge, random clots with little or no context. Sure, they may be tweeting some great stuff, but how can you tell? And nothing is more annoying than having your entire feed filled with a bunch of links three or four times a day, obscuring any real communication you might have had going on. These accounts never respond to @replies for more info, making us believe they are really nothing but slimy SEO marketers linkbaiting us. No thanks, loser.
Whiners: Unlike those first three, the Whiner is a real person. A really fucking annoying person who sees Twitter as a way to bitch and moan about everything under the sun and have an audience for it. Look, we all use it to vent sometimes: It's cool, okay? But if your feed reads like an emo kid's diary, we are done. It's like that whiny jerk you used to work with, who was always getting the shaft, having the worst day ever and out of coffee (remember that guy? Asshole!) -- except here, we're not forced to sit one cubicle over for the sake of a steady paycheck. We have the option to excise you from our life, and we're going to use it.
Recurrent Hack Victims: From time to time, hack happens. We get phished, someone figures out our password is 1234yourmom, whatever. Then those hackers use our feed (or e-mail or whatever) to spam the hell out of everyone, spread good-time viruses and generally be fucktards. Like we said, it happens, we understand. But if it happens to you a lot -- say, twice in a short enough span that we recognize and remember getting multiple Phishing DMs or trojan links from you -- you're gone. No offense, but if you aren't smart enough to change your password to something secure and/or not give it out to any pimple-faced kid who asks for it online, you just aren't worth the risk, even if you're a really great follow. See, it's like a fuck buddy with no standards -- no matter how fun the free booty calls are, the risk of infection is just too great.
Celebrities: The celebrity Twitter feeds are, with very few exceptions, utterly worthless. First off, it's blindingly apparent that the vast majority of these are manned by some poor shlub intern at the celeb's PR firm who has to tweet "in character" between running out for bagels and coffee and picking up dry cleaning. If we wanted to listen to interns, we'd listen to our own, thanks very much. And even if they are real, they don't follow back and they rarely interact with their followers. Their feeds are largely a way for douchebags to market themselves. No thanks.
Anything we've forgotten? Who else should we be dumping and why?
