The Steve Rubel Lifestream

Likely just taking out spam followers?

Robin, maybe?

That's the most likely option to me ... I've noticed a pattern on mine albeit on a much smaller level.

Not that I'm a high profile account but I noticed yesterday a drop of 100+ followers from my account. I think spammer cleanout

Yup, I lost about 100 followers earlier this week too. I'm not complaining though. Spammer cleansing perhaps? ;)

potentially a commonality of users, based on similarity of individuals above, who had some alternative motive - just a thought!

Same thing happened to me, I lost 180 or so overnight yesterday, it has happened before my guess is cleaning up spammers and dead accounts

Yeah, I thought they just deleted some spam accounts. They've done this before. Seems like once every 3 months or so.

I have a relatively high percentage of spam followers. My number dropped by nearly 2500 followers. Almost certainly a spam and closed account cleanout.

people : what percentage of ur followers would u estimate R spam?

I guess it's kind of like doing people a favor ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs ;)

>> Anthony Scaffeo >> Probably 2 to 5% of my followers are pure spam at any given time and 10 to 20% are clueless newbie marketers. You should hear @katheesue rant about those.

I would hope you big cheeses demand an explanation from twitter!

Isn't it kind of sad that you noticed?

I lost about 500 followers overnight as well. If this was a spam related closeout I am very happy about that. The total number of followers has become rather irrelevant anyway. More power to a smaller network.

wbaustin - their % decreases R a lot lower than the % of ur spam count - therefore, maybe they just focused on a subset of accounts. Anywho, UR a product of UR followings, not followers. To me, followers R irrelevant unless one relies on RT's.

Sounds like a spam clear-out, but it could be a counter-cache 'resetting' background process; Twitter cache your follower count (i.e. there's a column in the database that contains your # of followers) instead of querying the database to find (and then count) all your follower/followee relationships every time the number needs rendering in the browser. Counter-caches can drop out of sync for one reason or another (e.g. too much load on the system).

Mine dropped too. But now regaining :)

With 790 followers the other day, I noticed I lost 60. I guess it's possible I had 60 spammer following me, but a little surprising to me.

I wasn't affected by this, and I suspect that over 20% of my total followers are spam. However, 1 out of every 5 recent followers are legit. It's getting worse.

"Added since yesterday -3" and I have just over 500 and block obvious spam.

It didnt affect me! woohooo http://twittercounter.com/fadipick/month :P

I think they managed to purge out a lot of the spammy folks. I lost about 15% of my followers, but as far as I can tell they were all spam. The "legit" folks are still in there.

I wish there was a way to autoblock any follower with more than 250 friends. Let's be real, after 100 or so, you can't really follow more people effectively. Your just playing numbers or a spammer

I would have to agree with most it is most likely a spam clean out.

Not sure about losing followers but I was one of those culled myself. Been trying to fix the situation since Thursday and had to set up a new account. (this one)

Happened to me a few days ago - lost about 60 followers in just a couple of hours - but I'm fairly certain most were spammers. I immediately block all obvious porn followers, who are usually not subtle about their intent. Purging was probably a good thing....

I certainly hope it was a cleanout of spammers.. and I hope they do it more often. I stopped checking "new follower" e-mails as I was sick of seeing them.

I lost over 400+ followers. I guess those are all spammers..

According to Twittercounter, I didn't lose any followers, but I've got a low number of followers compared to all of you - 866 today (which I'm totally fine with since I'm a realtor and aiming for local people).

But, I just went through all of my followers last night looking to see if I missed anyone that I should be following, and noticed that the spam accounts were gone except for 2 or 3.

I've been seeing weird things for days, followers jumping up in lots of 10. API says 600, count says 300

Found you by way of an internet search. I lost about 100 followers overnight and I am wondering how is this possible. I had about 950 followers yesterday, and today I have 854 followers. Your posting helps give some insight to a possible explanation.

I'm totally annoyed, I noticed a drop in about 200 people, I figured, spam cleaning too. Later the next day, my count dropped to 0 followers and 0 that I was following. So I used THEIR invite tool to reconnect with people AFTER I submitted a "help ticket", they helped me okay, my account is suspended.

I don't consider my account high profile, but about 2 weeks ago I looked my account at night and in the morning it was 300 follower lighter.