If the person is a total stranger whose feed I do not follow, then I will look at this feed and consider climbing aboard. I’ll look at the ratio of how many tweets to how many followers that person has: if it exceeds 10 to 1, then I may suddenly feel shy. Because this person is unknown to me, I will feel no compunction to re-tweet a post of hers, though I may be tempted to “favorite” (the equivalent of Facebook’s “like” button) one.

But what if the person who has re-tweeted me is someone I know? Suddenly the pressure mounts. I’ll proceed to follow her, of course, if I don’t already. Then I’ll start feeling very guilty if I don’t re-tweet one of her posts.

Occasionally the disquiet caused by scanning an acquaintance’s home page for a reciprocal re-tweet can escalate. Mr. Richter said: “Sometimes I just cannot pull the trigger. Then I’ll bump into that person in the real world and they’ll compliment me for my tweet. That’s like saying, ‘I saw your jail video on the Web!’ ”

Further complicating these bouts of anxiety about reciprocity is that they tend to happen in clumps. Like other activities rooted in the nonessential (finally reading that back issue of The Economist, say, or trimming difficult-to-reach hairs on your person), Twitter is at its most compelling when you are trapped in an airport hotel in Tulsa. You’ll write 10 tweets that night, two or three of which will catch fire, drawing traffic. This traffic will want managing. You’ll wake up the next morning and discover you’ve got some thank-you letters to write.

Such a situation befell me recently when a joke about a family member (“Although it’s entirely untrue, my mother likes to tell people that I’m a film critic for NPR because that gets the biggest reaction”) was re-tweeted by two colleagues in journalism. A more political one (“America: we may not be able to provide affordable health care for all, but our podcast industry is untouchable”) was re-tweeted by the writer Merrill Markoe and “favorited” by the comedian Rob Delaney.

I wondered how to acknowledge this praise. I summarily re-tweeted tweets from both of my colleagues’ feeds. (I ruled out hitting the Reply button and writing “Thanks!” because publicly disseminated thank-you letters are, for their nonrecipients, the most boring reading on the planet.)