Has Twitter become overwhelming? It may be time to take drastic action. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired
Do I follow you on Twitter? Not anymore. In fact, I’m unfollowing everyone. It’s exhilarating.
I joined Twitter in 2006, and for the past six years it has consistently been my favorite Internet communications medium. I’m constantly overwhelmed by a data deluge, mostly via my email inbox, and Twitter’s short-form messaging has been the best way for me to communicate with others, gather information, and broadcast to all in quick bursts.
But over the years I’ve let my following count get completely out of hand. I followed too many, and unfollowed too few. And despite recent, concerted efforts at cutting back, I was still following 1,625 people as of this morning. Enter a new software tool called Unfollowing.net that would unfollow everyone on Twitter for you. I ran it earlier today, and it managed to cut back my follower count by about half — until Twitter nuked it for violating its terms of service. (Despite being an automated tool, it was still going to take seven hours to completely unfollow everyone.)
And although it’s gone, the tool’s principle purpose remains really valuable. It’s hard to start over. This was a tool that made it easy. My intent, and presumably this is true of most other people who were using it, wasn’t to live a life following no one. Rather, it was to clean up a list that had grown overly cluttered by beginning anew. And that’s actually quite hard to do. There should be a way to completely reset social media services. Twitter and Facebook should offer these tools natively. From a business perspective, I can understand why they don’t. But from a user’s perspective, it would make a lot of sense.
Going broke, declaring Twitter bankruptcy, takes all the thought and work out of deciding who to cut. There’s no relationship calculus, because everyone is treated as an equal.
My decision to unfollow wasn’t rash — and apparently I’m not the only one to dig into the deeper motivations of why we follow, and why don’t. A great post by Andre Torrez and another by (Wired contributor) Anil Dash made a strong case for abandoning our fear of missing out. A recent New York Times story on device addiction (and its subsequent rebuttals in Wired and The Atlantic) also made me consider the inordinate amount of time I spend “catching up” on Twitter. Have I been prioritizing the constant river of information above time I should be spending with my family? Would I be more productive without Twitter?
Mostly, though, it’s just about data glut. Even in short bursts, 1,600 chattering Twitter accounts had become too much information for me to keep up with. I’ve never able to do anything other than dip in and out of constant churn and flow.
But shedding all those followers is harder than it sounds. Once your follow count swells above 1,000, the simple act of clicking through each person and manually unfollowing him or her is time-consuming and tedious. It’s far easier to unfollow everyone all at once, and then re-follow selectively. But there’s also a social cost built into the act of unfollowing.
Over the years, I haven’t just followed people on Twitter, I’ve built relationships with them, and vice versa. I’ve made friends, great ones. I’ve launched several issues of a magazine. I’ve found solace in hard times, and celebrated in good. Whether or not you buy into Malcolm Gladwell’s “weak ties” argument (and I do not), other people on Twitter are always to some extent ties. Strong, weak, or rattily tangled by years of interaction, all are ties. And deciding which of those ties to sever is mentally taxing. It involves undergoing a relationship calculus, again and again. It necessarily means that you have to weigh some people as more important than others if you want to really reduce your numbers. That’s exhausting.
And so, for the most part, I found myself unfollowing news accounts, and restaurants, and robots and linkblogs. But there were only so many of those to shed. Before long, I was down to unfollowing people. Closing those doors is difficult.
Then there’s the question of what number to get down to. When I mentioned on Twitter how many people I followed, others immediately began chiming in with the right number. And that right number is always different. 100, 200, 500, 1,000. Even Dunbar’s Number feels like an arbitrary and artificial hard stop. (And were it not, why would it be so delightfully round? That Robin Dunbar rounded up his number to 150 proves its inexactitude.) When you decide to trim your Twitter, it’s hard to know what you should trim it to.
And so, why not go for zero? Going broke, declaring Twitter bankruptcy, takes all the thought and work out of deciding who makes the cut. There’s no relationship calculus, because everyone is treated as an equal. There’s no target number to test, because you’re racing to the absolute bottom. It’s a new, fresh, equitable start.
But until recently, there was no easy way to do it. Then, on Tuesday, Matthew Crist automated the process with Unfollowing. He explained it on his blog like this:
I have long felt that Twitter was becoming too much to try to manage on a day to day basis. Too many interesting things were being posted. So many, that I often found myself relying on Twitter for the discovery of new things rather than seeking out new knowledge on my own.
After reading this post from Andre Torrez, I decided to unfollow everyone on Twitter and start fresh. I still view Twitter as a great place to discover new things, but I don’t need to follow and keep up with over a hundred people that I don’t really know.
I soon found that to unfollow everyone would be a monumental undertaking as each unfollow would take three clicks via most clients, so I built Unfollowing to speed up / automate the process.
Now that tool’s gone. But I’m still trying to get down to zero, one click at a time, before I build up again. I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing. Mass unfollowing could be a colossal mistake. I’m afraid I’ll forget to re-add that one wonderful person whom I love, but rarely interact with.
Maybe you’re that person. And if so, please know, it’s nothing personal.
