(Following on from yesterday’s post – this is something I posted elsewhere a few years ago.
It was at the time I was thinking about shutting Still Waters down)
First published 2015.
Now June 2022, reading current comments it seems nothing has changed.
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There are so many ways to communicate with others these days
Instagram – Twitter – Facebook – Blogs are just a few
And this is where I start with no idea of where I’m going or where I’ll finish😊
I do have accounts on all of those with minimal……in fact no personal information apart from a photo in my public profile. You’d probably glean a bit about me from reading the blog avatar.
My personal fb account was to allow me to join craft (and other) groups, a few family and friends ‘found’ me and apart from newly discovered extended family…(discovered via family research sites)…I don’t go around asking others if I can be their ‘friend’.
Anyway about a year ago I kept getting ‘friend requests’ on this account – the odd thing was these were from strange men as well as male members of armed forces (soldiers sailors airmen – in uniform with rank displayed) Obviously those requests were deleted.
Then the same thing happened on twitter – a medium I used for a while for various reasons but haven’t looked at for well over a year. Lots of messages saying ‘so and so is now following you’ Once again strange very well built men, many with no tweets recorded but following loads of women Oh and also those new followers included women whose profiles described them as ‘se^xy’ looking for fun! It took a while for me (not the most tech savvy person) to find the way to block them, unfollow people and sites I no longer had any interest in and to decide to make the account private.
My (rarely used) Instagram account was getting the same treatment so that went private as well….that didn’t actually stop them – they just put in follow requests
Then there were the strange ridiculous and at times confronting comments that were arriving on the blog. They came in clusters thankfully stopping for some reason towards the end of last year. Luckily they didn’t all make it onto the blog proper- w/press scooped them up as they arrived and put them into spam folder for me to decide yea or nay.
So after a break I start writing on Still Waters again and blow me down if I don’t start getting emails informing me – ‘people with very strange names @ outlook’ – have become followers. I consulted the help forums and lo and behold I’m not the only one getting them………WordPress were aware and were trying to (not sure what) do something about it.
I then discovered a feature available in the settings of my w/press blog There is a way to remove/delete followers. You learn something new every day
I thought it was only the other party who could do that – you couldn’t block a follower.
So armed with this knowledge I went through my followers list checking their ‘credentials’ and deleting an enormous amount. Most of whom were unknown to me. People who hadn’t blogged for years, people whose blogs were closed/deleted, bloggers from online courses never to be heard from since, others from ‘financial’ sites or travel places – you know all those people who follow because you wrote about something once (but never again) I will admit to feeling a bit better once that had been done and of course if I’ve removed a live reader they can always refollow.
OK everyone, come on and help me here. Am I the only one to have gone through all this rubbish – was I naive in thinking all those things couldn’t happen to me? For a while there I even wondered if my name had been entered on a dating agency’s books
Public blogs are like open jars of jam waiting for nasties and other strange things to fly in and ‘spoil’ the taste so I can’t complain.
However I’m curious to know about other people’s experiences with followers on those other sites.
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First published (elsewhere) 2015.
Now June 2022, reading current comments it seems nothing has changed.
Still Waters 
Oh wow… send me an e-mail and let me know how you ‘culled’ your list!! LOL One of my strangest Facebook incidents was when I received a “people you know” and a photo of my deceased MIL showed up. Uh…
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That’s because someone hijacked her FB account. I see this a lot with accounts that get very little use. Someone does some copying, pasting, reinventing the account and gets those friends from the old account to accept the new friend request. Then they have a heyday.
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Blogging is the extent of my social media exposure. I am pretty certain that some of my followers are not people with whom I have anything in common. However, if they dont comment I leave them be. And if they do comment and those comments are objectionable I block them.
My email on the other hand is getting some VERY strange emails. Quite a lot suggesting things I could take to improve the potency of an organ I don’t have… And others thinking that what I am really waiting for is the chance to correspond with some hot asian chicks (their term). Sigh.
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Similar for me, just change the sex of the those who want to follow me, often very attractive Russian ladies. For all the cleverness of the internet, there is something very basic about me that it has not picked up. In fact given a pretty lady wants to have fun with me and she only lives one mile away, the internet doesn’t even seem to know where I live. What is this mile thing she speaks of?
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I get an occasional spam comment on the blog. The facebook men often seem to have the same photo and are often “surgeons”. I probably get one a month of those.
Twitter and Instagram are unbothered by spam so far and my email is good at filtering out the massive amounts of stupid.
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I LOVE hearing about life in Australia. From Kansas, it’s the next day in Australia, so I’ll know if it will be a good future. Hearing about winter in Australia helps when we’re scorching here. I don’t blog, and didn’t mean to register on Facebook and don’t use it. (RNs have to protect themselves a bit: a pic holding a half glass of water will be misunderstood in a flash. Maybe when I retire.) I just replied to a phsishing thing last week, and it sent “send me Amazon cards” to my contacts, AND it deleted my contact list, AND all of my old emails. My son said I’ll recover. At least a deep spot in the Yahoo/AT&T system returned my emails. Yep, I have a back-up system, but my son says it doesn’t save email contacts…..pooh. Linda in Kansas
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I started with facebook for similar reasons to you. I cull regularly. Apparently I have the other accounts but have never used them. Military men from America seem to want to get to know me. My blog is small enough to attract very little adverse attention.
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Very few people want to follow a cat so the blog has been relatively untroubled. F had an instagram account but made it private at the outset. We are otherwise unconnected by tech. and will likely keep it that way.
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Really what is it with those military guys. I get great delight in blocking them on Instagram. Don’t have any other social media accounts. Facebook annoyed me so much I deleted it years ago. I’d get messages from long lost school friends, real ones. Then I’d reply, send a message to find out what they were doing and they rarely returned an answer. So why get in contact in the first place.
I like Instagram. It’s easy to use, easy to block and unfollow.
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Facebook and my blog are my only social media platforms. I recently went through my FB page and deleted a lot of people I didn’t know that well and did not follow. I have also been cleaning closets. LOL
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I do blog and a tiny bit of FB, just to follow my family and see what they are up to. if you go to privaacy on FB you can make decisions on who can message, I also have mine set up that only friends can view. it is in the settings. you might be onpublic. i don’t get any of the things you mention here.
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I get my part of Russian (not Asiatic) women and strange witch doctors’ advice. I am also on FB for the same reasons as you, where I get friend requests from nice looking men (yes military ones too) with totally empty profiles. This happen in a trickle, not every day, but several times a week.
Once, in January ’14, the spambots had discovered one of my blog posts, posting upwards of 2000 comments a day. That made me put on Capchas for some time 😉
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