So, is Twitter spammy?

[primsong]

Okay, I fully admit to being the internet equivalent of a verrrrry slow dinosaur here, but I'm thinking of getting a twitter account - I've never even used twitter thus far - and am sort of circling it cautiously, poking it with a stick.

Question to you twitter people - does it create a lot of spam? I'm trying to figure whether to risk linking it to my email, or whether that will get out into the wild and become a spam target if I do.

Comments

note: NOT a twitter person

[archersangel]

from the twitter things i've looked at i'd say there's a fair amount of spam.

Re: note: NOT a twitter person

[primsong]

Hmmm. Part of it is I'm involved in a new church getting started and they want to use twitter as one of their ways of letting the world know they exist - wanting to support the home team, so to speak. But I do hate spam. Maybe I'll set it up with the email acct. I use for online business stuff as that already gets spammed anyway, rather than my personal one then. :-/

[elij_0650]

Short answer is: it depends...

I tend to use twitter to follow "interesting people" and the occasional weird promotion or bot doesn't make much of a ripple.
My choice is to only have replies or favourites of my posts showing up on my e-mail.
The number of people you follow and who respond to you can make traffic large so I check my twitter stream once a day (usually) and use it as a reference to articles and events happening on the internet, rather than a place to chat & catch up with friends.

So like I said, it depends on how you use it and who you follow what outcomes you will get. I'm not much help but I have had a lovely time the past 4 years reading about the world from other people's points of view.
Hope you find a great group of people if you take the plunge.

[kerravonsen]

It depends who you follow. Me, I use it to follow friends I already knew from other contexts, plus things like the Dreamwidth status twitter, so I know if Dreamwidth is down. I avoid anything remotely commercial or promotional. I don't get tweets emailed to me, I just check my twitter page in the morning and evening before and after work (sometimes more often, sometimes less). I do get emailed when someone follows me or retweets me. When someone follows me, I check them out; if they seem to be following me just so that they can get the links (because if someone follows you, your page links back to them, thus, theoretically boosting their ranking in search engines) - then I block them, sometimes reporting for spam if they seem to be a spammer account (e.g. posting only nonsense with links attached). If they seem legit, with a real reason for following me, I let them be.

[primsong]

Thank you so much! Very helpful info. I think I'll dip my toe in the pool and set it to not having emails sent to me then - I'm glad that can be tweaked that way.