Unfollow.

Social Media As ever I haven't made any new year's resolutions, mainly because if you're the kind of person like me who wants to keep them there's the work involved and if you're also the kind of person like me who tends to become depressed and guilty when they can't keep promises, especially to themselves, well that leads to depression. And guilt.

Nevertheless, I have decided to try and experiment.

When Twitter increased the number of potential feeds one can follow to five thousands, my first reaction was to merrily begin following organisational feeds, institutions, film studios, museums and media feeds. Dozens and dozens and dozens of media feeds.

Which broke it.

By which I mean, the humanity of Twitter, the magic which is supposed to make it something other than a repetitive RSS feed, stopped, at least for me as I opened up the iPad app or Tweetdeck and ended up with wave upon wave of "content" and often repeated "content" from the many sources.

Plus there are the accounts which spend their time not presenting anything much in the way of news but instead simply retweet praise for hours and hours and hours as though that's of interest to someone who's already convinced themselves enough that they like a thing to follow a Twitter feed about that thing.

Here's the experiment.

For the next year, I'm going to attempt, as much as possible, only to follow accounts written by a human in their own name, hopefully (though not essentially) with a photograph of themselves.

I have an exception list. The main BBC News feed, the main Guardian feed, BBC Weather, Merseytravel, Liverpool Echo, that sort of thing.

Other than that, I'm returning to email lists and RSS for everything else.

Instead of following a media outlet's feed for example, I'm following the feeds of the individual journalists or if there's a lot of them, the people I've heard of. Usually they're all listed on the given account. If they're not, well ...

Having processed on this for a few days, it's already working. Twitter feels once again like the place it was at the beginning, a celestial cocktail party, conversation and reaction uninterrupted by some film feed tweeting some link bait for the fifth time that day. In other words, the only advertising which tends to pop up is Twitter's own sponsored content.

I'll keep you posted. Or tweeted.