I’ve been asked to write rules around the leaderboard. Rules are stodgy, and the leaderboard concept is pretty simple. With a little common sense I expected everyone would realize faving and retweeting your own tweets in order to promote them to the leaderboard is generally not acceptable. Almost everyone does realize this.
Never-the-less, I would like to remove confusion if it does exist, so I’ve updated the FAQ and added the following as the third point:
The aim of the leaderboard is to show tweets that will be interesting to a significant portion of Favstar’s user base. The tweets are selected based on the number of users they have received favorites and retweets from. The reflects the most popular recent tweets in real time.
Celeb tweets are generally filtered off unless the tweets are of interest to more than their over-enthusiastic fans. Some tweets are filtered off automatically or manually for obscene language, and on rare occasions a tweet is filtered off at Favstar’s discretion. Sadly, some tweets are accidentally omitted if the language software incorrectly guesses the language of the tweet.
Please do not favorite or retweet your own tweet with the intention of making it appear on the leaderboard, and please do not ask others to fav or retweet your tweets. When this occurs Favstar will likely remove the tweet from the leaderboard, and may prevent the user’s tweets from showing there in the future.
Likewise, please do not create a second account that you use mostly to retweet other peoples tweets when you don’t find the tweet worthy of a retweet from your primary account.
