If this is Duncan’s Dream, can I be Freddie Krueger?

It would seem a fairly uncontroversial statement to say that wealth is not synonymous with genius. Despite this, the world seems littered with wealthy people who seem unable to dissociate the two. Take Prince Charles for instance. Prince Charles recently had an idea that putting coffee up your bum would be a far more effective method of treating cancer than using chemotherapy.

The fact that this is a bad idea, is by the by. The point is that because Prince Charles is rich and powerful he assumes his ideas must be good ones and so we all have to listen to them.

Tweeters amongst you will probably have noticed the #duncansdream hastag doing the rounds in recent days. If you aren’t aware, this refers to the dream of Duncan Bannatyne, one of the rich people who is rude to poor people on Dragon’s Den. This in his own words is Duncan’s dream:

#duncansdream means all my followers follow each other then they will all have 93,912 followers each

That’s the dream. All his followers follow each other and get 93,912 followers each. Maybe world peace will be next week.

If it weren’t for the 140 character limit the above tweet would have probably have included *stands back* *takes bow* *pats self on back*. So wealthy is Duncan Bannatyne that he is now totally unable to differentiate his own ideas from true genius and I’m afraid there is a rather large problem with this one.

Let’s do what Duncan forgot to do and think this through with an example. Theo is on Twitter and follows Duncan. He follows 100 other people because he likes what they write. 50 people follow him back because they like what he writes. Duncan’s dream comes to fruition and suddenly Theo has 93,000 followers. Genius? No.

The problem is that Theo is now following 93,000 people himself. Prior to the dream he followed 100 and followed them because he liked them. These people whose tweets he actually wanted to read now represent only about 0.1% of what he has signed up for. These are now all mixed in with the new 99.9% which he followed not because he wanted to read them but because it was Duncan’s dream. Please tell me how his Twitter experience has improved because of this.

If Forrest Gump was right and Twitter is like a box of chocolates then prior to the dream Theo had just those purple ones with a hazelnut in which he likes the best. Post-dream all the purple hazelnut ones have been mixed in with all the ones he doesn’t like, eaten up and shat out. To get what he wants, Theo is now tasked with picking through the poo looking for traces of purple hazelnut chcocolate.

This isn’t just a problem for Theo though, all of the other 93,000 have just realised they have exactly the same problem. Duncan’s dream has just completely fucked up the following list of every one of Duncan’s followers. This is not even a good thing for Duncan. Remember, Duncan was one of the people they had chosen to follow before hand – one of the purple hazelnut chocolates. His tweets too have been lost in the poo. Your 93,000 followers can’t hear you any more, Duncan. Sorry.

If Duncan’s dream were a good idea then a logical extension would be that everyone on Twitter should follow everyone else – i.e. bin the whole following thing and everyone shout at once. If I follow someone it is because I would like to hear what they have to say. If someone is proposing to me that following people when I don’t want to hear what they have to say is a genius idea then I’m afraid – I’M OUT.

RedEaredRabbit