Life Yesterday I systematically went through and unfollowed three thousand people on Twitter. Since the change in US presidency and Brexit, Twitter had become unusable. Every time the pumpkin in chief tweeted, even having blocked him, my timeline would echo and re-echo every word, comment on it, offer some hot takes, some jokes and although that's fine initially with a chamber that large it became deafening drowning out everything else. Partly it's because of the number of "random" journalists I followed on various publications for whom its their job (sort of) but at a certain point this tipped over into *everybody*.
I had a few rules. No one who was following me back. If it was someone or something I genuinely liked or connected to, they and that remained. So everyone Doctor Who. Most people related to Shakespeare. I pretty much dumped everyone film related but I expect a lot of those will creep back in, but organically, just the websites and magazines and YouTube channels I read and watch rather than as much as possible just in case I missed anything as was the case. But all of the athletes went as did the literally hundreds at certain media organisations. Twitter is a hoarders paradise, collecting feeds just in case there's something interesting. Just in case.
My timeline is quieter, not updating as often. But more importantly I don't feel any less informed than I did before. So far. I saw all of the Golden Globes news from last night (Go Natalie Portman!) and the few journalists and columnists who remain are the ones which I'd usually pay attention to anyway. Slowly I'll probably follow back a fair few people, but it'll be organically rather than just opening up a list somewhere and add everybody to the point that there's so many of them in my timeline posting in-jokes I feel like an employee. More's to the point, I'm less likely to miss what's written by friends. Which was the original point of Twitter, wasn't it?
