I unfollowed (almost) everyone on Twitter, and nothing happened.

I was following nearly 600 people on Twitter, slowly accumulated since I first made this account somewhere in 2010. It’s easy to follow people on Twitter, everyday they suggest people on the side bar, and you’re slowly being overflowed with information.

For the past few months my timeline was a mess, I was overloaded with information. What made it worse was that Twitter started showing the original Tweet no matter how old it was if a mutual friend replied to it. And because very few people I knew in real life were on Twitter it was somewhat unwanted information to me.

So I unfollowed every one of them, it took sometime, because following people is easy but unfollowing them was hard. So after I unfollowed all of them I started following the important people one at a time but this time more carefully.

I went to the interactions tab and started following people that actually interacted with me most on Twitter, also followed people who were by good friends that I knew in real life. And some of the news publishers that I followed to get daily news. In the end I ended up following 200 people. I know it’s rude but I had no choice.

So what was the end result, nothing happened. Basically I didn’t notice that I was missing anything or being left out, it was like the timeline I used to had but with much less clutter, because I followed few people on Twitter I didn’t see that many replies, but I mostly saw original tweets by people I was following rather than discussions that I didn’t want to see.

I saw that Twitter was introducing some new profile that looks more like Facebook, I hope they will stop showing or have an option for us to opt out from seeing replies from mutual followers. I think it’s more of this discussions on Twitter that makes all the clutter on the timeline because we actually pay very little attention to them.

Also another thing I noticed was that even though I was follow so many people I was only interested in seeing tweets from very handful of people that actually interacted with me on Twitter apart from all the content providers.

Although we see other people’s tweets on our timelines I guess we mentally filter the rest of them and only focus on tweets from people that we interacted with most or we know in real life. I think this is the fact that
I was not feeling that I was missing anything from Twitter even though I unfollowed almost all of them.

I can’t remember the exact name, but in statistics there is a number that represents the number of connections (friends) we can have in real life, the number is actually 150. And even though we have more friends we actually care only about the most important 150 of them and we can’t have productive, or keep in track of more than 150 connections in real life.

I think same can be applied to Twitter and I suppose you only need to follow 150-200 people on Twitter and if you follow more than that you won’t be able to keep in track with all of them and you’ll basically go in to information overtflow. What do you think?