Imagine an internet as elegant as a third-wave coffee roaster’s logo

Dear Hipster:

Every now and again, I get a Twitter follower from my past, often someone I haven’t spoken with since before Twitter existed, and then that person pops up with “so-and-so has followed you.” That’s cool, but for some reason it really bothers me when that person has a private account, and he or she doesn’t accept my follow request. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but if somebody has the time to follow me, he/she ought to have the time to touch a single button and accept my follow back. Is there any way to communicate this?

— Danny, La Mesa

This is one of those weird, unforeseen quirks of partial platform integration. Your social media pretty much treat everyone you’ve ever written an email to as a potential “friend.” I daresay our apps assume too much.

We wouldn’t have this problem if hipsters had designed the whole thing from the ground up. It would be as simple and elegant as a third-wave coffee roaster’s logo.

There should be a word for having a private account that you don’t maintain, thus forcing potential followers to wait around ad infinitum for you to grant them access to your secret Instagram treasures, which I presume you must be hoarding if you’ve set your account to private.

As per usual, I’ll be taking suggestions for this much-needed neologism at hipster@sandiegoreader.com.

I don’t think you should “do” anything about it, because, to quote the famous B-side to “Sad But True” (since we’re loosely on the subject of covers that are more famous than the originals), so f*ing what...who cares about you? And by “you,” I mean anybody who practices shitty Twitsagram discipline.