I’ve neglected this blog in the past few days, with many things going on during the week, so I’m going to ease back into it with a short but hopefully incisive post about Twitter.

I like Twitter, and I use it a lot. I have a fair number of followers, and I’m content with that. But tweeting since 2010, I gradually racked up an extremely high number of people I was following – over 1500 until last week, and more than twice the number following me. A lot of these accounts were ones I’d followed during never-repeated conversations with them, or because I was at point more interested in what they produced than I am now, so this made using Twitter extremely noisy; I had more tweets on my homepage than I could possibly read, and many of them didn’t appeal to me.  

In the last 24 hours I’ve had a spring clean and drastically cut down the number of users I’m following. This means I can now concentrate on listening to people I know and who interest me, and engage more with what they say, so hopefully will make what I tweet more relevant to other people online.  

Using one of the websites which provides notifications when you’re unfollowed by someone, one person whose tweets I now no longer read just mentioned me saying ‘@MrAlexGabriel unfollowed me’ – they are, I see, no longer following me either, presumably as an attempt at some kind of revenge.

That doesn’t bother me. I didn’t know them. What does bother me, though, is the implied culture of following on purely reciprocal grounds, on a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ basis, as if the aim of following someone on Twitter is motivating them to follow you back out of a sense of duty, rather than any appreciation for what they tweet.

If you’re interested in what I write on Twitter, . If you’re not, don’t. I won’t feel bad. If I’m writing uninteresting things, I’d rather realise it than be followed on false pretences. But don’t follow me if you’re expecting me to follow you back, just out of politeness. It would be insincere for me to do that, and there are too many people I want to give my attention to follow everyone who wants a hand climbing the ladder.

Alex Gabriel