Why I’m not following you on Twitter
(Note: This is the destination page for my Twitter profile. If you’re looking for my actual blog, click here)
I’ve begun paring down the people I follow on Twitter. I used to follow everybody who follows me, and block those that I didn’t want to follow back. This was easy because I was happy to follow anybody except spammers and the like, so there was no problems.
Once I hit 100 people, though, it got difficult to justify following some of the more prolific Twitterers, especially those who didn’t generally post anything that I wanted to read. Note: I’m not saying they posted crap, or were dumb, or anything like that. Just that I constantly found myself personally not engaged with what they said.
Further, I have a very small (less than 10%) subset of people I follow on Twitter who are true-life friends who I see on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or who help on or listen to my shows, and who post messages that are personally important to me. I found them constantly being drowned in a torrent of Tweets from the people above.
So, I broke my 1:1 rule and stopped following some people. It’s nothing personal, I just couldn’t keep up. If you’re wondering how I chose who to cut, here are reasons I’ve used in the past. This is by no means a comprehensive list. It’s just stuff I remember.
- Twittering your local sports franchise play-by-play. Scores are fine, as are really good plays or interesting observations. But “3rd down and 7. I think they’re going to pass” is sure to get you unfollowed.
- Play-by-play of other things that I’m not interested in. The Grammys. Some reality show. I just don’t care and if it pushes off stuff I do care about, I’ll drop you.
- Auto-generated tweets. I’m talking stuff like “New blog post: This is the title of my blog post. Tinyurl Link”. A few of these is okay, but if Twitter is just a place you advertise your blog, I don’t need to see it. Especially if I get a dozen in a row I’ll drop you like a hot potato.
- Being a douche. This one’s hard to define, but if you’re consistently a jerk for a long time, especially to me or a friend of mine, I’ll drop you. I have thick skin but I don’t need the annoyance.
Just if you’re curious, here are things that I will NOT drop you for:
- Having a differing political opinion from me. I like hearing different points of view so would never drop you just because you think Obama’s a secret Muslim. Note, though, that if you go on and on and on and on and on (and on) about it, I’ll drop you for being annoying.
- Having a differing religious opinion from me. Pretty much for the same reasons above and with the same caveat.
I have also stopped following people just because they follow me. This is mainly because SO MANY spam bots follow me it’s getting annoying to check my followers. However, if you’re a real person and think I’d like to follow you, email me or tweet using my name (WesleyC) and I’ll see it.