I Just Stopped Following You
I hope you won’t be offended that I stopped #following you, if I was following you. You’re not that special, because I stopped following…
I hope you won’t be offended that I stopped #following you, if I was following you. You’re not that special, because I stopped following everybody on Medium. My hand is really tired because the only way to stop following people is to click on each and every green button next to the person you are following. I was following more than 1,000 people (I didn’t look before I started so I might have been following more than 2,000).
This is one of those times that @Medium really pisses me off, since it would be fairly simple for the company to give us a way to manage who you follow rather than just assuming that decisions you made about who you are following will remain true forever. I remember when I started “un-friending” people on Facebook; I’ve reduced my friend count by ~1,200 and Facebook’s algorithm improved tremendously because I was getting rid of all the “friends” who I didn’t know or hadn’t met or didn’t care about. (It still pisses me off that Facebook has corrupted the word “friend” and made it almost meaningless, compared to what it used to mean.)
I’m “un-following” everybody to find out whether Medium can actually learn what I’m interested in reading. I don’t know why I followed all those people I just unfollowed. But I do know that Medium has been sending me notifications about stuff that I don’t want to read. But I like that Medium has gotten people to write really good stuff, and I’d like to see more that good stuff. And the only way I know how to effect what I get notified of is to manage who I follow. (Please let me know if I missed some other way of doing it!)
Now I’m going to pay close attention to what I get notified of or manage to stumble into on Medium. I’m going to carefully curate who I follow. I hope I get a trickle (which is about all I can manage to read anyway) of really really good stuff: well written, funny, insightful, meaningful stuff.