I just went through my entire list of people I was following on Twitter and cleaned house. Even though my following count was only just over 100, I’ve begun to really dislike scrolling through my feed without having gained any useful knowledge. Did I really need to spend those few minutes looking at my feed? Did I gain anything of value besides finding a way to spend a few minutes (minimum) of my life?
In deciding who to unfollow, there were so many people that I thought were interesting but didn’t necessarily publish content on a day to day basis that I was interested in. There’s so much duplication of content that I need to sift through when scrolling through my feed. I love baseball and so I follow a lot of baseball related accounts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to see a majority of baseball content in my feed- it just means I want to see a variety of baseball content/sources in my feed. I ended up creating a baseball list devoted to baseball accounts that I followed. Now if I want to hear some baseball stuff, I’ll have to search the dark corners of Twitter to get to said baseball list; Seriously Twitter, why even have a Lists feature if it’s so hard to access?
The same is true for politics: I might follow a few Bernie Sanders related accounts but I don’t want to be bombarded with a Bernie tweet ever 15 minutes. I might just be following them because I think he’s an interesting guy and want some Bernie related content. Some people publish rich original content occasionally that I don’t want to miss out on, but I don’t want to have the added cost of having to sift through the remainder of what they publish.
Here’s my two cents on what I might like to see on Twitter instead of what it is today:
The most original content from each of the accounts I follow; If a person tweets once a week, show me what they’re saying. If they’re tweeting 10 times a day, don’t show me every tweet right off the bat. Try and predict which of their tweets, if any, will have the most value to me. I can always check to see every one of that person’s tweets if I wish to
A separate feed or sidebar that contains content either retweeted by people I follow, or recommended content based on who I follow and what I like. It’s interesting that some accounts with the most interesting content often retweet other interesting content, which I may also appreciate. The problem comes when 2 or 3 people are retweeting the same interesting content. Recognize when there’s duplication- only show me once.