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I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refol

I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do? If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user. In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets. However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.

barnabee 5y ago
Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline. I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals. I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  > use something to sort and filter my feed It wasn't even that long ago when we had at least some of those options via external clients. That was until Twitter started to dismantle that possibility and limited external clients much more heavily.
noir_lord 5y ago
I'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out. That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable. As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say. It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.

barnabee 5y ago

Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline. I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals. I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
> use something to sort and filter my feed It wasn't even that long ago when we had at least some of those options via external clients. That was until Twitter started to dismantle that possibility and limited external clients much more heavily.

noir_lord 5y ago

I'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out. That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable. As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say. It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.