It’s pretty clear something happened in July.

We know this much — TechCrunch was dropped from the Suggested User List, right around the time their follower count started heading down. As to why, we can only speculate that it was because they ran a piece that Twitter didn’t like.

7/16/09: Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet.”

People have always questioned whether there was a connection between being on the list and not being too critical of Twitter. At this point, there isn’t much doubt that the connection is there.

Here are the concepts that Dave would like to teach you about:

Sample Size — It is commonly believed that you need to have a large sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions. Dave disagrees. In his world, one data point is sufficient.

Causation — In Dave’s world, post hoc ergo propter hoc isn’t a logical fallacy, but a natural law. TechCrunch was removed from the SUL after that article, therefore that article was the cause of the removal.

Correlation — With the Dave Winer statistics model, you don’t need to consider evidence that you don’t like. Have any of the folks on the SUL written critically of Twitter? Who cares? That doesn’t matter! As long as the data fits with your theory, accept it, otherwise ignore it!

Science just got a whole lot easier.

Imagine there is another Twitter-like service out there that had a SUL. Imagine that Dave has posted about this service before, and is an active user of it. Can you imagine a situation in which he wouldn’t have included that service’s SUL in one of his rants?

I sure can:

Dave hasn't complained about the FriendFeed SUL because he's on it

First, he proposes a 30 day limit for time spent on the SUL. This is not a difficult suggestion to translate. Prolific Twitter members are a finite resource, so forcing people off of the list every 30 days would hasten Dave’s inevitable placement thereon.

Second, he wants to take away followers from people on the list now. Yes, really. His proposal is to figure out how many followers each of the folks on the SUL would have gotten in 30 days and then take all of the others they gained over that time away.

So if on average, over the last few months, a member of the list would have gotten 100K new followers, but actually received 800K, he or she would lose 700K followers. It’s still a gift of 100K followers, nothing to sneeze at. (And if it’s true, as Tim O’Reilly says, that they don’t matter, then losing some is nothing to complain about.)

I can scarcely put into words how myopic and outlandish this idea is. He seems to believe that “followers”, rather than being actual users — actual people, are just a commodity to buy, sell, or trade. Which of those those 700,000 followers are getting the boot? Are they allowed to re-follow? Are they going to be notified that their follow list is just spontaneously being changed by Twitter for no reason apparent to them? The users can already unfollow if they’re not liking what they’re getting.

If they’re not reading what they’re getting, the only value they hold is to those who put so much stock in their follower count. Makes no sense, really, unless you measure the size of your e-peen by the number of Twitter followers you have, something Dave clearly does.

I wasn’t on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn’t in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why — he secretly paid Winer $10,000:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I’ve been delighted with my purchase and although I haven’t checked recently, I’m pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. …

The $10k didn’t ‘just’ give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I’ve built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.

To be perfectly clear: I have no issue with Dave having sold default subscriptions. I have no issue with Twitter’s user list. But for Dave to proclaim “that’s not how the internet works” with regards to the latter after having engaged, to his great benefit, in the former is particularly blatant.

At the very least, Dave should be saying “I know I’ve done this before, but I shouldn’t have. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.” That would at least bring these two issues into alignment. Otherwise all we have is a situation where random third parties are (supposedly) benefiting from the “evil” actors behavior while the villains gain nothing. That’s an interesting contrast to the other story, where the bad guy made $10k.

I sent Dave an email asking for an explanation, but as he’s ignoring the same questions in the comments of his posts, I suspect nothing will come of it. Or he’ll offer to trade an answer to my question for my identity, effectively deflecting the question because, as anyone who knows Dave can tell you, he doesn’t take criticism or questioning of any sort well at all.