The Whores of Social Networks

3 September, 2009, 8:56 am

I gotta tell you, I am pretty 9!$$ed off right now. Apparently there are some morons out there selling facebook, digg and twitter fans.

I had seen this happening at twitter since the early days, people paying money for “friends” and followers. And of course I thought to myself, “what a worthless load of crap!”

Hey, if you are paying for friends, let me ask you something. Back when you were a loser in school, did you pay for friends then? Did they really like you?

socialwhore1You see, if you need to pay someone to follow you on any social network, they don’t really care what you are saying. The beauty of the social networks is that the people who follow you actually care! They are customers and clients, not sales people providing a service.

As far as I am concerned, taking money for following and friending people is another incarnation of the world’s oldest profession.

What really bothers me is that it is dishonest. There was once a time when you could determine the social value of a site, profile or page by how many friends and followers there were. No longer. Now the only thing that says is that they have deep pockets.

These people taking money for extending the social graph are pimps. The followers you gain are their whores. The red light district always becomes seedy and run down pretty soon after these folks move in.

Facebook, Digg, twitter, and the others can try their very best to police this, but you and I need to take an active interest in our communities and take the following steps.

  1. Never take cash for your social friendship
  2. Immediately unfollow anyone you suspect of paying for friends
  3. Immediately unfollow anyone you suspect of selling their friendship
  4. report every solicitation to the authorities as spam

If we work together we can save our communities from becoming a bunch of whore houses.

More on this topic




Leave a comment