Deciding who to follow
A lot of you ask me on Twitter, “WAI WUNT U FOLLAW ME????” and I never seem to have a good answer. This is because the people I follow on Twitter must meet a level of very fuzzily-defined criteria that I myself am not entirely sure of.
As a response, I came up with a formula that weights various aspects of a single tweet and based on those computes a tweet value. A program samples 100 tweets from a user’s timeline, averages their tweet values, and takes into account factors unrelated to the tweets themselves (such as high profile users that follow the user, etc) to adjust the average value. This results in a final value that I call “follow worth,” which represents how worthy a given user is of me following them (or, from a more self-centered point-of-view, how much value I get out of following this user).
This manages to assign a value to a given user (this value tends to be in the 20,000 range). I realized that I, in my infinite narcissism, tend to follow people like myself, so I computed my own value (25615) and divide every value by it to get a percentage of how much people are like me. Some very awesome Twitterers I follow had worths between 90%-110%, so I basically rank as follows:
≤50%: Following this person is strongly discouraged.
50-70%: Following this person is discouraged.
70%-110%: It can go either way, but consider following this person.
≥110%: Follow this person.
≥200%: Holy crap, follow this person
As for criteria that are included in the computation of one’s follow worth, they include:
- Use of proper grammar, including punctuation, capitalization, and so on. This is ranked very highly. Exceptions are made for intentional grammar rules being broken (like all caps tweets, etc, for humor).
- Proper use of newlines in tweets (but not excessive use)
- Links to certain sites, such as reddit.com, which I personally find entertaining.
- Use of swear words actually boosts follow worth, because I enjoy them for some reason.
- Each hashtag used is about -1000 points, because they’re annoying.
- Using “bieber” or “jonas” in a tweet is a million point deduction :)
Other criteria are included, but this is getting long enough already, so I think I’ll stop here.
