I vet everyone who follows me everywhere. I've personally vetted thousands of people all over the globe. I very rarely have to deal with crap because I am so meticulous making sure my followers are genuine people. You guys never see the followers who abruptly vanish during off days when they sink into the quagmire of hateful porny drunken self pity that suddenly floods a list I have them on. Sometimes those people have 50K+ followers, and you know what? I don't care. I don't care how popular you are, who you are in the industry, how groovy other people think you are, if you're blowing up my feed with suckage, then *poof*.
Sometimes a *poof* is a little more agonizing than that because we've developed l'histoire. Even then, almost nobody notices when someone goes missing from my interactions. Like today. *poof* Had enough of you, mister.
I'll spell it out. I'm very publicly stand-uppish for the underdog. I support crisis networking. I've been very open and honest about my own stuff and how I feel about other people being exploited.
Exploiting has become an acceptable behavior because most of social media is exactly that, exploiting other people's content for money, traffic, and attention, depending on what part of the food chain one resides. The 'little people' usually go for the attention thing. The way they exploit others is by sharing content and then making remarks into their own feed about what they just shared, or by jumping into someone's content with the kind of remark that is supposed to rile people up and stimulate more response. No one is immune, and no one is sinless.
Most people handle this with privacy controls. Just put fences up and keep the crap out. Even I tell people that anything goes on a public feed, it really is up to each individual to control their own timelines and create the house they live in on social media. Control means monitoring the crap that comes through your yard. I have an open yard, but I also have a buncha bottle rockets in a coke bottle for strays, if you need imagery. Sometimes I have to sting someone's toe with a pellet gun (still imagery), and sometimes I have to point blank excommunicate offenders after politely asking and being ignored.
I don't go looking for people to follow. People follow me. If you choose me, it's your job to notice my style, my ethics, and my tolerance levels if you're going to jump into my stuff. I'm not the bad guy for drawing a line here or there, I'm just being considerate of readers I've gathered who might not appreciate being snark targets.
I have two fave comedians. One of them snarks other public figures sacrilegiously in order to get noticed and mocks being on the D-list, the other snarks only himself and made it into the A-list on his own talent. I have deep respect for both of them working so hard and becoming who they are. Anyone paying attention can see the public snarker still follows certain etiquette rules.
My latest *poof* is kinda like me, a yaps-a-lot, but not like me at all because he doesn't care about his audience. All he cares about is splashing around in the big ol' social media pool and crapping on lawns. The more response he can stir up, the more successful he feels scribbling I was here all over the windows.
