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11 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
As a social media site, Twitter is functionally feral. We don't have a single agreed-upon set of rules for engagement, which is why you see authors begging people not to tag them in negative reviews, and people railing against snitch-tagging, weekly.
You get to set the rules for your own feed, because no one is forcing me to see it. If all you want to post is nudes of yourself eating sandwiches, that's on you. Twitter T&C might have some words for you, but no other user gets to dictate your content.
When I follow your feed, I am opting-in for that content. I still don't get to dictate it. Now, if it changes dramatically, I may opt-out again, and if we are actual friends, I consider it within the realm of "acceptable" to ask about the change.
This is mostly because some people get really upset when a friend stops following them. So going "hey, did you mean for your feed to become nothing but timed self-promo tweets posting every five minutes?" is fine, as long as I don't order you to stop.
(A friend who WOULD have been upset to be unfollowed recently started posting all of the BackerKit alerts for their latest Kickstarter, one after the other, drowning my feed. I asked them if that was intentional, they said no, the service had glitched, and fixed it.)
Some people mute rather than unfollowing, but if you're a friend, you might still participate in discussion on my feed, so I prefer not to mute people.
Some people use Twitter primarily to sell things--websites, seminars, political agendas. You do you, boo. I'm an author. I use Twitter to sell myself. I get it. If your feed is interesting, I will follow it anyway.
But dropping sales links, unprompted, into someone else's feed, either as replies or by @-ing them, is spam. Spam is rude. A single tweet may not fit an actionable legal definition of spam, but it's still a tinned processed pig product, and it will not endear you to me.
My response to spam is generally "please stop spamming me." I will forget you did it, given a day or two. Unless you double down. "How was that spam?" is not an argument you want to start. I used to work for the phone company. I have Opinions.
Note that sometimes sales links are the right response. When I go "who do you know that's open for commissions?" or "who's selling pretty dice?", I am requesting those links. But it's in bad taste to reply to even direct questions with an unsolicited service.
Herein endith the sick, cranky, hungry but unsure of ability to eat complaining about manners.
