Will Taye Diggs’ reign of destruction never end? After the entertainer’s devastating 2013 split from Idina Menzel, you probably thought the worst was behind you, that you were at least immune from having your heart broken by the man again. But no: He’s about to unfollow you on Twitter, if he hasn’t already.
Taye Diggs is best known in the real world for his acting roles (and his megawatt smile, Jesus Christ, Taye, stop it), but for several years now, here on the internet he has been the object of much head-scratching for his bizarre social media strategy of following hundreds of thousands of strangers on Twitter. “Taye ‘Short for Scott-tay’ Diggs followed me back! I’ve really made it!” you might have screeched when you realized he was following you—until you saw that he was also following approximately 600,000 other people. Including me, and I am no one! I didn’t even follow him first! He started with journalists and other influencers, but before long his standards slipped and he was following pretty much anyone with a pulse.
Earlier this year, Diggs’ social media guru Lance Laifer gave an interview to GQ that illuminated very little about this strategy. It sounded as if Laifer, age 51, had almost no idea what he was doing, other than cashing Diggs’ checks. Hey, nice work if you can get it. It must be said that Taye Diggs, who everyone has an awful lot of goodwill for on account of him being Taye Diggs, does not have a great Twitter account. Save for an excellent bio (“I’m serious chocolate and don’t get it twisted.”), it’s mostly retweets for some show he’s on (#MurderInTheFirst) and inspirational quotes. And the follow-everyone strategy hasn’t raised his Twitter profile as much as he might have hoped. Many people think that the lower the ratio of people you follow to people who follow you, the cooler you are. Kanye West, for example, follows one person: his wife, Kim Kardashian. He has 24.5 million followers. Diggs, for all his “strategizing,” only has 611,000 followers at present.
Well, now it seems like Diggs may finally be recalibrating his Twitter tactics. On Tuesday, Vocativ noticed that he was on an unfollowing spree, going from following 638,000 people to, at present, 602,000. He even unfollowed actual (sort of) famous person Leslie Grossman. What the heck is going on here? Is this former social media slut embracing minimalism? Some theories:
- He has finally realized how dumb his social media manager’s strategy is, but before he fires him, he is forcing the guy to unfollow everyone so he can have a clean slate.
- He fired his social media manager without getting him to unfollow everyone first, so he is trying to take care of it himself, but his poor hands are getting really tired.
- He is now going for some super-niche demographic, inspired by how low-rated TV shows are kept on the air because they do really well among extremely specific groups, like people with household incomes above $225,000 who are divorced and live in the Midwest and shop at Target and work in health care, so he is purging followers outside of that demographic.
- A Wikileaks-like information dump provided to Diggs and Diggs alone revealed that everyone he unfollowed badmouthed The Best Man franchise without actually seeing it.
- He’s just messing with us all.
- He is trying to trim down the list of people he’s following to 525,600, because it’s a number that has worked out well for him in the past.
- It was never Taye Diggs’ account at all; it was all another brilliant piece of performance art from James Franco.
