My life is in Twitter limbo
Image by adria.richards via Flickr
Last week I logged in to my Twitter account only to discover that all of my followers had abandoned me. I had only one follower left — and that was me.
Did everyone I know suddenly decide they didn’t want to read my tweets? Was I really that boring? I was truly hurt, until I looked at the number of people I was following and discovered that it, too, had zeroed out. I was suddenly following no one. And the people that I follow are anything but boring. I would never abandon them.
So how did that happen? In my quest to find out, I have been placed in Twitter limbo. My account is suspended, I am unable to tweet and there’s no human being to ask what happened.
The road to limbo started with an innocent request sent to Twitter through one of the many help/complaint links on the site. I merely asked why the followers had disappeared and if they could be restored.
I received an instant response that if my account was suspended, I could request it be returned to active use. I didn’t think I was suspended, but how would I know? So I responded to the “suspended” link in the email, and asked to be reinstated if I was suspended. And by the way, could I have my followers back?
As it turns out, I wasn’t suspended at the time. Which didn’t explain why I lost my followers, but at least left me relieved that I still had an active account. A few people even signed up to follow me. I was up to three followers.
Hey, it’s a start.
But that stopped quickly. Twitter suspended by account. The message in the red block on my home page only stated, “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know.”
I responded by asking to have my account reactivated, but the request went unanswered. I’ve asked again, and the request is now “pending.” In the meantime, Twitter’s troubleshooting section said a number of accounts have had their followers zeroed out. They’re looking into it.
So now I’m waiting. I don’t want to open a new account and start over. I want my account with my name and my small but loyal group of followers back.
Fortunately, I haven’t reached the point of obsession. Unlike some of my friends, I don’t need to tweet. I can live without it.
But why should I have to? Why, Twitter?
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Viv — This may have started with one of Twitter’s periodic purges of spam followers. (I also lost some followers last week; everybody did.) But I’m sorry you wandered into the black hole of Twitter Support, from which no user of the service is ever known to have emerged alive. Good company, great product, but the worst support in all of social media. Hope you get straightened out.
I’m seriously considering breaking up with Twitter. I just absolutely cannot find anything it’s useful for. I follow my friends on Facebook, it’s an overwhelmingly shit tool for article promotion and I don’t care what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch.
If Twitter had bothered to add any damn features at all to any degree since its launch(a favorites list? the un-broken ability to find specific people?) I might consider staying, but I consider the company to be frankly, really lazy, and content sitting on their asses raking in the money while us idiots tweet away on a site that more or less serves little to no real purpose.
Sorry, addendum: Twitter doesn’t actually make money.
Even mega-twitterer @aplusk is backing away a bit. Last week he said he declined a spot on the Twitter board because he wants to stay neutral, and that something better will come along to replace Twitter.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s simply grown too big too fast and that can be very hard to manage. Not much consolation when you’ve been twumped. But really, Viv, it’s not you. It’s them.
Viv-
Argh. I see your account is still suspended; I tried to follow but was told to mosey along.
I am still a big fan of Twitter, but I’m not addicted. I use it strategically — it’s a plus for me but not the end-all and be-all. I’m rooting for Twitter to get its act together. I’ll look forward to following you soon.
Thank you for sharing yet another mystery from thr realm of technology. I’m a new contributor to True/Slant. While honored by the invitation to contribute (my blog is called “In Justice”), I hesitated because the mysteries of technology sometimes cause extreme anxiety in me, a normally stable person. Knowing that I’m not alone in the black-box realm is disturbing in some ways, but ultimately reassuring. I hope you share the next chapter in your Twitter saga.