Comments on: I Never Unfollow Anyone or Unsubscribe to Anything

By: Go Big Always – Numbers we track in our online/offline life

Go Big Always – Numbers we track in our online/offline life — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:27:27 +0000

[...] no one wants to give you negative feeback. Sure, Robert Scoble stopped following 106,000 people but most of us don’t want to unfriend, unfollow, or unanything that would send a negative message … So, while we focus on driving our social numbers up as high as possible, those numbers end up being [...]

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:30:54 +0000

I can understand why you do that. For certain things, it makes sense. I do things differently because I want to use Twitter to develop and maintain relationships. I use the web interface to access Twitter. I don’t use a program. I’m getting about 2 to 10 follows a day on Twitter that feel like auto follows. The accounts either mostly post using TwitterFeed and don’t interact… or they follow 9,000 people when they follow me, don’t provide content of interest to me and are unlikely to ever comment to me. (And if they do, I can see it on replies.) I just don’t want the clutter. I don’t want to be marketed at with no interaction back in return on my personal stream.

By: Mike Mathews

Mike Mathews — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:24:26 +0000

You rightly mentioned the big loss: serendipity. While being able to focus on specific subjects is great, creativity comes from the added dash of serendipity, the tangent that might ever so slightly curve our thoughts into a completely new and possibly better direction.

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:25:05 +0000

I don’t begrudge Robert his decision to scale back. However, he’s still following over 28K people on FriendFeed and I always understood that place to be his main playground (sorry, I meant to say “source of information”), so I don’t think he actually gave up a whole lot.

By: Justin Kistner

Justin Kistner — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:03:21 +0000

I picture myself having a spot down in the left frontal lobe? I have a little reading chair and warm blanket.

By: Shelley

Shelley — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:39:53 +0000

A little “tweet in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere”, eh?

I wonder if Scoble has kicked off an unfollow meme, and that’s why Twitter has crashed?

By: lilbutterfly

lilbutterfly — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:11:35 +0000

I appreciate this blog. It makes sense. Personally, I’ve had the rare unfortunate circumstance of someone who kept harassing me through Twitter DM’s-hate to call it “stalker-like”, but it was. I had to block that. What would you do in this case?

By: Brett Borders

Brett Borders — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:58:09 +0000

Mass unfollowing people strikes me as kind of insincere or sketchy, as far a social media moves go. I’m not accusing Scoble of being a follow hustler or spammer, but I like your philosophy better.

I do unfollow people who send me annoying DMs or spammy stuff, though.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:35:10 +0000

Yes, seems like he caused the problem in the first place by auto-following everyone. Auto-following is the real problem here.

I do unfollow but only on specific cases. Annoying tweets mainly. If my twitter home page fills with your @ replies for instance.

By: Shawn Farner

Shawn Farner — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:19:07 +0000

Props for not being elitist, Marshall.