Why are you unfollowing people, idiot?

Hello!

You may have noticed that my Following numbers have dropped so I'll fill you in on why.

The two previous blogs explained how I started on FavStar and things like that (start at the one before the one before this if that makes sense).  I was a person that just wanted to keep getting followers and followers and followers.  And the easy way to do that was to just follow someone back that retweeted me.  Odds are they would follow back and WOOHOO!  A FOLLOWER!  Yup, I was excited (and still am frankly).

There are two weeks left in my FavStar and I probably won't re-up.  I don't think.  It wouldn't be for the trophies but I do use them now and again.  I used to give them daily and now it's one a week or so.  I used to actually plan out who I was going to trophy, talk to people about it and talk about who retweets a lot for a trophy, have strategies, etc.  People still do, which is great, I'm not going to tell anyone how to do Twitter and if you are looking for followers I highly suggest doing that.  AND I actually DM'd 2 people a long time ago when I first started saying, "Hey, uhhh....did you get my trophy?".  Yup, I was an idiot.  Still am.

Anyhoo, I was following over 18K people.  18 THOUSAND.  That's pretty well like standing in Fenway Park and trying to listen to everyone's conversations.  I didn't check the capacity for Fenway, but let's just assume.

So, I got a message from a friend on here saying that he is happy that he can read his TL now.  I saw a couple of other people do it as well and talked to them and I figured it would be a thing that would be good to do for the long run until this website dies to someone who starts another site that can do 160 characters.

So, I started to clean it out.  I hate doing it, but I want to be able to read the tweets of the people I follow.  So, I started.  First, I started with the people I'd never heard of that didn't follow me back.  That was a bunch right there that I just randomly followed.

Then, I went through my TL and started clicking on the far right or left wing political tweets.  I literally had over 400 that were daily saying, "IMPEACH OBAMA!".  It would just be those types of tweets non-stop.  Is it their fault?  No, of course not.  I clicked the "Follow" button when I shouldn't have.  I just blindly followed people because they liked something that I wrote.

As you saw in the below post, I have an addictive personality.  So, when I hopped on an Unfollow App,  I just started clicking.  And clicking.  And clicking.  I unfollowed a few people who (or whom?) I didn't mean to.  Once I clicked it I went, "Yikes!" and tried to find them.   I'm still looking for you, Clint.  Sonofabitch.

There's a few.  I also went on www.twitonomy.com and it said, "These are the users that are not following you".  So I thought, "EASY!".  Click click click.  And then I came up to @bradbroaddus - my best buddy on here and it said he wasn't following me.  I thought, "Well, that isn't right".  And of course he was following me - and I figure a lot of those other people were too.  D'oh!

Now, I've unfollowed about 12K people.  And a few I followed back right away because I had actually never seen their tweets before and someone retweeted them into my TL.  Like @lifecoachfit and @nickc46.  I saw Nick's tweet, retweeted it and followed him and he was apparently already following me.

I will be unfollowing more, I'm not done yet.  It just takes time to sit down and actually do it.  I'm not talking about people who don't retweet me, just ones where I am just a number on their list and they are a number on mine.

Now, THERE WILL BE MISTAKES.  And if we talk to each other, I didn't mean to unfollow.  You can just write, "Hey, idiot" or something like that and I will fix it.  People like @laurabx (I've checked her account 5 times to ensure that I didn't click on hers) and @loribuckmajor.

After about a week of doing this I received a few comments.

I had one guy say, "This really bums me out" and showed a pic that said I unfollowed him.  He was really nice about it.  THAT'S the type of person that I like - I followed him back asap and we've talked a minor bit now.  Fantastic.

Then I had one person last night talking about how she RT'd me, starred me and trophied me and then I unfollowed her and that I hope I enjoy my "shiny new ratio".  But you know what?  Her Twitter, so she can do what she wants with it.  I'm sure I'll get more comments, some good, some bad, but it happens I guess.  I've never done this before and I don't plan on doing it again as it ain't fun.

After this I look forward to making a whole set of new mistakes.