The effects of Pinterest’s cleaning up of spammy accounts are being felt but the top one percent of users. 99 percent of users would have lost just a few or fewer than 10 followers.
So how bad was the impact felt by the top one percent? TechCrunch reports that according to Lyle Dennis of Top Pinterest Users, as much as 20 percent of followers from the top 10 users disappeared over night.
But despite the purging, only one user was ousted from the top 10 spots. Otherwise the upper echelon of Pinterest users remain in relatively similar positions, with some shuffling of rankings in the top 10. TechCrunch reports in an example that number one user, Joy Cho /Oh Joy! had 12 million users and fell to below 10 million, before getting back up to over the 10 million mark. She still stands as the most-followed Pinterest user. Jane Wang, a user who had 7.5 million followers moved up three places seeing as how she had the fewest followers lost (approximately 600,000 followers were removed).
Prior to the purge (based on rankings from Social News Daily):
Joy Cho/Oh Joy!: 12,733,689
Bekka Palmer: 8,465,927
Maryann Rizzo: 8,073,270
Bonnie Tsang: 7,889,295
Jane Wang: 7,514,671
pejper: 6,826,436
molly pickering: 6,786,757
Jan of Poppytalk: 6,703,051
HonestlyWTF: 5,483,892
Olya Bastet: 5,162,212
After the clean up (based on the numbers at the time of this writing so it’s possible that some spammers have returned since):
Joy Cho/Oh Joy!: 10,129,664
Jane Wang: 6,878,355
Bekka Palmer: 6,789,276
Maryann Rizzo: 6,746,551
Bonnie Tsang: 5,913,671
molly pickering: 5,438,701
Jan of Poppytalk: 5,413,495
pejper: 5,060,908
HonestlyWTF: 4,394,899
Christine Martinez: 4,256,777
It’s a formidable effort for Pinterest to try and rid the social network of spam accounts. Twitter has become the poster child for these issues, but executing a clean up is easier said than done. Due to the nature and number of parody accounts that exist on the platform, Twitter might have to stick to its case-by-case basis.
Facebook has also recently made efforts to clean up its site. The site reportedly has over 83 million fake profiles (that number will be higher since the report was from August 2012) although scanning through more than 1.1 billion users is a more complicated task than purging a site with just 20 million users like Pinterest.
