Patrick Timmons Is Shite

Right, I am about to write my worst blog ever.

It’s an exposé of what those populist Arsenal-tweeting/retweeting accounts are up to and why. I’m going to expose them by telling you everything I know and have learned about them.

You know them:

Mike Sanz (62K followers)

Danny Wel-Beast (50K followers)

Patrick Timmons (18K followers)

Best AFC Whatevers

Etc., etc. They all seem to cross-RT each other and tell you to get following the other cos you don’t want to be missing out.

And they make me sooooo angry. Why do they make me angry? I don’t know. But they reeeeally piss me off. And below I’ll have a stab at working out why they piss me off and why they do it.

The thing is, I don’t actually know very much. Now, a good investigative journalist would do his homework and check his facts.

But this is 2016. Homework? Proper journalist? Investigation? Pfft.

I’m a bad, non-investigative non-journalist.

No, my method is far more brilliant…and lazy.

I’m going to set out my working theory based on a few things people have told me or hinted at or shared, and then you lot will read it, and if you know stuff, you can correct me, or add to the pool (puddle) of knowledge.

It’s basically crowd-sourced journalism of very low quality and dubious accuracy.

So this post may change drastically over the next few days or so as I edit, add or scrap bits based on knowledge gained.

But why am I angry? It seems to be because I don’t want some fucker to keep telling me to get following Patrick Fucking Timmons cos his tweets are sooo fucking great. They’re not. They’re shit. They’re obvious. And they’re stolen or recycled. But somehow they have 500 RTs. Every time he farts he gets 500 RTs. And his mates ie the other Mega RT accounts, they all RT him because they are basically the same person or people or network.

I mean, look at this shite. One of these got 500 RTs and another got 1000 RTs.

And then this shite got 3600 RTs:

Does my head in.

But it’s the injustice of it all. Just compare that to 4 gems I shot out this afternoon. Finely crafted masterpieces, each.

And how many RTs did I get? I got a total of 18 RTS. And the Chihuahua milking one? No RTs. NONE. Not one. That was comedy gold.

It’s a fucking travesty of twitter justice. That’s what chafes my nutsack.

Anyway, this isn’t about me. (It is, really.) Patrick Timmons needs to get to about 50-100k followers to really start making any money and right now he’s at around 18K. So you can expect to hear how you should follow him for his fucking great tweets a lot more in the upcoming months.

And it’s business. Big business…for somebody. And that’s why they steal and recycle tweets. Because it pays better that way.

How do they make money? Well, one way is to get really big by tweeting really populist shite, the kind of things the newbies gobble up, like, say, this shite:

And get RT’d up the wazooo all week, and then just before the Arsenal match, (or whoever their “demographic” is,) they flog you some betting links.

Based on this article, when the Twitter account gets big enough, a betting company buys your account and then pays you to operate it.

Some “accounts” operate on their own work with betting companies to push traffic to their websites through sponsored posts.

Here’s a quote from @WengerKnowsBest. He is one of THE GOOD GUYS:

“Quite a few betting companies have come to me looking to do affiliate deals, or deals where I would get a percentage of the LOSSES made by my followers who are pushed to their websites. However, I’m not comfortable, in a Wengerish-guise, encouraging people to take up betting,” and who adds that he’s “been offered money to sell the account.”

(All them quotes are nicked from here: https://sports.vice.com/en_uk/article/the-twitter-farms-making-money-from-your-favourite-parody-accounts)

Yep, those Arsenal accounts feeding you populist (or recycled) shite all week are just doing it so that they can profit from your fellow Gooners when they make a loss from gambling. They make a percentage off the losses. Profiting from misery. Great for the soul.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO ABOUT THIS OUTRAGE?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Nothing. As you were.
2. Not much. Know what’s going on. (Hence the blog.)
3. Turn off their RTs if they annoy you. There’s a button for that.
4. RT my tweets instead

The purpose of this post is not to have these accounts mass-blocked or drummed off twitter or anything but simply to inform you, and me, so you know what’s going on. Because I didn’t.

So, educate me, and educate everyone else while you’re at it. Tell us what you know in the comments.