I follow the folks who interact with me, but can’t tolerate stalkers.

My opinion on the follower contest that seems to go at Twitter is well documented here. People follow other people so they get followed back. Some people have the whole process automated. They follow based on key words and reciprocate follows they get. If they begin to follow someone and that person doesn’t follow back, they stop following — just so they’re not tagged as spammers.

It’s a lot of bullsh*t, if you ask me.

I follow people I find interesting. A while back, I’d look for interesting people on Twitter by reading tweets in the public timeline or for search results timelines. I don’t do that much anymore. Now I find them two ways:

• People I follow retweet content posted by people they follow. If that content interests me, I’ll likely check out its source and perhaps start following.
• People who follow me interact with me by replying to my tweets. If enough interesting conversations develop, I’ll likely begin following that person.

Interacting means a two-way exchange of tweets. I say something, someone responds, I respond back, etc. It’s a conversation that moves in one direction or another.

Interacting doesn’t mean indiscriminately retweeting what I say or link to. Bots can do that. I block bots.

Interacting doesn’t mean replying with simple “LOL” retweets. If I LOLed at everything I read on Twitter that I thought was funny, I’d be doing it all day.

Interacting doesn’t mean spending 30 minutes a day retweeting and LOLing half of the tweets I’ve posted in the previous 12 hours. That’s more like stalking, which I blogged about last year. I don’t follow stalkers. I’d like to block them, but I’ve discovered that when I ignore them, they do go away. [Hint: if you repeatedly try to interact with me and you get no response, I’m likely ignoring you. Stop stalking.]

If you’re interested, here are some other reasons I won’t follow people on Twitter.

I’m always interested in following intelligent, witty, and well-informed people who tweet about topics that interest me — the same topics I often tweet about. These are the people I think I can connect with. The people I can learn from. The people who can enrich my life.

And perhaps I can do the same for them.