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I think people use Twitter for different things, but for me Twitter has completely replaced RSS, IM, and news. Unlike Facebook, where none of the people I follo

I think people use Twitter for different things, but for me Twitter has completely replaced RSS, IM, and news. Unlike Facebook, where none of the people I follow have relevant interests to me, on Twitter I only follow people who post things I'm interested in. Over time, I've learned to unfollow actual news sources, but instead I follow a collection of editors (who wind up performing a very useful curation function). I'll still follow links to actual news stories, but I never go to any news web pages directly anymore. I'm pretty good about constantly pruning my follow list, as I actually read all of my timeline. (Most people seem to have decided that that is futile, and only occasionally read their stream).

jonathansizz 12y ago
How many people are you following? How long did it take you to build a really high-quality stream? My stream has around 60 accounts, and I also read my whole timeline. It already feels like this is approaching the maximum that I'll be willing and able to give proper attention to. I'll probably prune some of the lower quality ones out before I add any more.
- m0nastic 12y ago
  I just checked, and it looks like I follow 500 people (which is actually way more than I would have guessed, and I'll admit is kind of ridiculous). Most of them aren't super high-output though, which helps. I've had to unfollow lots of people who tweet a lot. I've been using Twitter since 2007 (my account id number is in the 6-figures range). I feel like it took about a year or so to figure out how I wanted to use the service (and for there to be people I was interested in following), and it's only maybe the past year that I've discovered the benefit of unfollowing news accounts and following specific editors instead. I also have pretty varied interests (I think the mix of people I follow is pretty evenly distributed between fashion people, photographers, news editors, functional programming people, infosec people, and comedians). That mix gets adjusted periodically as my interests shift (I unfollowed a lot of infosec people about a year ago as I've tried to extract myself from that community). It's a work in progress.

jonathansizz 12y ago

How many people are you following? How long did it take you to build a really high-quality stream? My stream has around 60 accounts, and I also read my whole timeline. It already feels like this is approaching the maximum that I'll be willing and able to give proper attention to. I'll probably prune some of the lower quality ones out before I add any more.

m0nastic 12y ago
I just checked, and it looks like I follow 500 people (which is actually way more than I would have guessed, and I'll admit is kind of ridiculous). Most of them aren't super high-output though, which helps. I've had to unfollow lots of people who tweet a lot. I've been using Twitter since 2007 (my account id number is in the 6-figures range). I feel like it took about a year or so to figure out how I wanted to use the service (and for there to be people I was interested in following), and it's only maybe the past year that I've discovered the benefit of unfollowing news accounts and following specific editors instead. I also have pretty varied interests (I think the mix of people I follow is pretty evenly distributed between fashion people, photographers, news editors, functional programming people, infosec people, and comedians). That mix gets adjusted periodically as my interests shift (I unfollowed a lot of infosec people about a year ago as I've tried to extract myself from that community). It's a work in progress.