If this is Duncan’s Dream, can I be Freddie Krueger?
06/06/2010 5 Comments
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
About RedEaredRabbit
RedEaredRabbit 
You always finish on a killer line, I love that style of writing 🙂
This seems to be the least thought out plan ever. Presumably anyone with 94,000 followers has a large percentage of ‘fake’ followers (Britney types etc) is everyone supposed to follow them? Surely that’s exactly what they want? Thank you mr dragon.
I also notice Duncan follows a normal amount of
people himself.. Does he not fancy trawling through 94,000 tweets every 5 minutes? It’s frankly impossible and ridiculous.
What is the big deal with follower numbers anyway? My LEAST favourite tweeters are ones that beg for followers. What’s the big deal with it anyway? To get popular on twitter isn’t about numbers, it’s about everyone waiting for your next tweet.
There’s only one way to do that.
Tweet funny interesting informative stuff. Find great people to follow and
enjoy what they say. Most importantly, ENGAGE with people who @reply you and genuinely make a connection. Good luck with that if you have 94,000 @replies to respond to.
The last line was a bit cheesey but I couldn’t resist.
Very good point that the man himself hasn’t decided to follow any of these people. I suppose his main motivation behind all of this was simply to get himself some publicity, in which case it has unfortunately worked.
I didn’t know what it was all about – I’d seen the #duncansdream on Twitter, and seen that it was something to do with Bannatyne. At which point I tuned out. 😉
I second this. Surely you should follow people because you like what they have to say, and not because some rich media bloke told you to follow them.
What Duncan’s after is a non-anonymous version of 4chan without the images. People shouting over others, everything piles in at once and you get zero relevant information from it. That’s NOT how the system works, or should ever work.
To be honest though, what happened in practice was that most people added a few dozen followers, deleted some oddbods over the following weeks and were left with some new interesting people to follow. The idea was drivel if taken to extremes and there are always people who just want mass following but as with many Internet things you can make it work for you without going crazy.