Repairing past Twitter sins

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There was a time, in the not so distant past, that I was a little interested in some friendly competition to see how fast I could get to 1,000 Twitter followers (I made it, but lost the race). Doing this is easy: just set yourself up to autofollow everyone who follows you. This will get you no end of get rich quick schemers, multi-level marketers, and inspirational speaker wannabes.

These people, of course, are probably fine individuals loved by their families. But they are not HPC folks. Twitter is actually a helpful source for news, but the news was completely obscured by the noise. Something had to be done.

So I started by turning off autofollow. Step 1 of rehab. Step 2 was cleaning up the mess.

I’ve spent the past week (in between hacks and coughs) culling the people I follow from around 1,000 to 300. I did this by axing all the obvious ones, and for everyone else looking at the bio or the tweet history for some evidence of HPC. No evidence, or nothing in the bio, axed. Possibly I’ve unfollowed some of you — apologies. You can’t cull 700 baddies without bruising a few innocents.

And that’s where step 3 is going to come in. I’ve set up a bunch of new Twitter alerts to catch HPC ripples in the Twitter stream. If you tweet about HPC, at least quasi-regularly, I’ll find and follow you.

The other side of this is a help to the community, and something requested by a few readers. The list of people I’m following with the insideHPC account should hopefully be a good place for the rest of you to start if you are looking to dip your toe into the HPC zeitgeist via the tech world’s favorite web service.

twitter.com/insideHPC