I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. This is what I learned.

On January 3rd, 2020 I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. At the time I was following 3,200 people. Here are my reasons for taking this drastic step, and the lessons I've learned form 21 months of following nobody.

Even in the Before Times, when nobody was thinking about vaccine passports or dewormer medication or whether a pandemic killing millions was a global leftist conspiracy to overthrow the least popular president in US history, Twitter was often a hellscape of verbal abuse, misinformation, and people microblogging their mental and emotional breakdowns over the collapse of our climate, our democracy, our society, and humanity itself.

Pretty Hate Machine

Opening Twitter on December 31st, 2019 was like dunking my head in a bucket of angry bees. My feed was overflowing with existential dread, political disenfranchisement, industry outrage, and people pouring their fear and hurt and anger into a social media platform in a desperate bid for empathy and human connection.

Reading this you may wonder what kind of people I was following at the time. The answer tells the story: Mostly people in the web and internet industry, predominantly women and BIPoC, mostly located in the USA.

I sat in our couch on the morning of new years eve drenched in social collapse and felt depression wash over me like waves of broken glass. It was all too much.

For me, the little blue bird had transformed from a source of information and connection to a pretty hate machine . People were frustrated. People were angry. And while none of it was directed at me, I couldn't help but take it all in as if I was somehow responsible for it all.

On New Year's Eve 2019, my peer group on Twitter were expressing their fears of a world coming apart at the seams. On the horizon was a US presidential election already expected to cause further divisions. And in among the chatter were hints that people were getting sick in China.

The pretty hate machine was causing me harm, so I had to turn it off.

How to Unfollow Everyone

I've followed the writings of Anil Dash for years, and in my bookmarks I had an article he published in 2018 about how he unfollowed everybody on Twitter . This action works counter to everything Twitter is about, and mass-unfollowing is a tedious and cumbersome process. The system is created to make you follow more people, not unfollow huge groups all at the same time. Dash outlined how to use an automation tool to not only unfollow everyone but also save your follower list for future reference.

Even though the article was 2 years old, and Twitter's APIs had changed a lot since then, I decided to give the process a go and see what happened.

The automation process ended up taking 3 days, during which my Twitter account was total chaos and at times appeared irrevocably broken.

Note: I have no idea if this process still works today, and this is not something I recommend doing. For all I know, doing a mass unfollow like this today may lead to your account actually breaking, or some other unintended negative outcome.

When on January 3rd 2020 things started settling down, I had the odd experience of opening the Twitter app on my phone and seeing only my own Tweets reflecting back on me.

What I learned from unfollowing everyone on Twitter

That was 21 months ago. During those 21 months, I have at most followed two accounts at the same time on Twitter. And I have no plans of returning to following large numbers of accounts any time soon.

Here are some of the things I do instead, and some of the lessons I've learned about the platform, about people, and about myself from unfollowing and not following anyone on Twitter:

Lists are amazing

You'd think if I don't follow anyone on Twitter, I don't see what anyone is talking about. And you'd be wrong. In lieu of following people, I add them to lists . This gives me the capability of sorting people in groups and taxonomies based on my relationship to them and what they talk about. I have lists for tech ethics, for friends, for people I've met at conferences, for political conversations, for web standards, and APIs, and platforms, and people who like to argue with me. If I've interacted with you in any way on Twitter, I've likely put you on a list. Which sounds ominous, but in reality just means I can choose to see what you're talking about when I want to, and I see it in context instead of in a huge stream of everything all the time.

I also follow lists created by other users, like the AI Ethics & Policy list curated by Kate O'Neill .

Most of my lists are private, but I also occasionally make public lists, for example three lists based on the All Sides Media Bias chart : News Left , News Center , and News Right , and a list of Twitter accounts sharing pictures of animals .

One thing worth noting about Twitter lists:

If you add people to a public list, they are notified. If you add them to a private list, they are not notified.

Unfollowing someone with a private account makes communication impossible

Some people have their accounts set to private. Among the people I used to follow were several women, BIPoC, and LGBTQ2+ who made their accounts private due to ongoing harassment and other unwanted interactions. When I unfollowed everyone, I discovered I could no longer see their posts, and I also couldn't send them direct messages. Interestingly, they were also unable to send me direct messages. I only became aware of this issue when one of them contacted me through another platform to let me know I was effectively unreachable for them on Twitter.

In hindsight this was an obvious consequence, and there's currently no meaningful workaround for it: If I were to only follow people with private accounts, that would be very obvious to anyone paying attention, and would highlight the private status of these accounts. And because the accounts are private, adding them to a list makes no sense because the posts from these accounts are private and thus not visible to me.

Twitter had a significant negative impact on my mental health

In the weeks following the Great Unfollowing, I suffered from what I can only describe as Twitter withdrawal: I found myself checking my phone constantly for updates, only to discover there was nothing there except my own Tweets. I ended up uninstalling the app from my phone to force myself to stop checking. The FOMO of not being exposed to the perpetual stream of content was very real.

After about 3 weeks I started noticing something new: I had more space in my mind to think about things. Not having a constant stream of other people's thoughts pouring into my brain through my eyes allowed me to focus on other things. And when I experimented with checking back on the list I made of all the people I used to follow, it felt like rubbing my brain with broken glass. In hindsight I can't understand how I spent hours staring at that stream almost every day. It was clearly harmful, to the point of being an addiction, and I never want to go back there ever again.

People make a lot of assumptions about you when you don't follow anyone

When I started the unfollowing process, a bunch of people who I used to follow contacted me asking what they had done to make me unfollow them. I explained it had nothing to do with them and that I was unfollowing everyone. This was explanation enough for most, but some still felt very hurt by my unfollow.

To alleviate the confusion I posted the below tweet and pinned it to my profile:

Once that initial wave of reaction was over, an interesting pattern emerged: The only people who commented on me not following anyone were people who wanted to fight me on Twitter. I'm not going to post any of their tweets here, but they're easy enough to find.

The pattern is almost identical each time: I say something somebody doesn't like - about the importance of vaccines, or why open source needs ethics, or how peanut butter cups are a food crime - someone chooses to engage with me about this issue and get irate when I refuse to accept their point of view as the truth, and then suddenly they go "Hey, look at Blue Checkmark guy over here! He doesn't even follow anyone! What an arrogant [insert preferred expletive / offensive name here]."

At that point the conversation typically ends.

Some people think following nobody is an indicator of moral decrepitude or arrogance, which is understandable. And since there's no way for me to change Twitter's interface to display "Following 0, Lists: 58, Accounts in lists: 10,000" thats something I have to accept.

The Twitter Explore algorithm is a dumpster fire

Opening Twitter you have an "Explore" page where the platform shows you relevant news and Tweets based on who you're following. When you stop following anyone, the algorithm first has a complete breakdown and either feeds you nothing or feeds you completely random content. Then after a while, it starts using demographic information as its baseline, along with some other metrics I have yet to understand.

Clicking on the Explore tab right now, this is what I get:

1. Assortment of trending topics, news, and entertainment, based on what's trending in North America.
2. Section heading "Vancouver" (where I live)
3. Section heading "British Columbia" (where Vancouver is located)
4. Section heading "Keith Richards"
5. Section heading "Ontario"
6. Section heading "Harden" (appears to be about NBA)
7. Section heading "Varane" (appears to be about soccer)
8. Section heading "UX"

This is fairly typical. From these and similar results it is clear the algorithms have deduced a couple of things about me and makes decisions about what content I'll be interested in based on those deductions:

• Lives in Vancouver -> Content about Vancouver, BC, Canada, and the US
• Is a man -> Content about sports, specifically NBA, NFL, and soccer
• Is an old -> Content about ageing rock stars
• Has interest in the web -> Content on open source, UX, design, etc

The surfacing of content about my job indicates the algorithms do monitor my interactions with other people and links posted on the platform, but it's also clear my gender and age both have higher weighting in the algorithm since I keep getting recommendations for stereotypical "male" content like NFL and barbecuing and NASCAR and other things I do not care about or interact with at all.

Sometimes I'll follow a single person for a few weeks

If you go to my Twitter profile right now , you'll discover I actually follow one person: Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D . This is something I've started doing when I want to dive deep into a topic: I find one person with clear expertise on the topic, and follow them exclusively for a while to get exposed to what they have to say. In the case of RVAwonk , that topic is online misinformation and the information published through their account is both well researched and deeply troubling.

By following this one account I can dip into the material without submerging myself, and share information from the account with my followers to show them content they otherwise probably wouldn't be exposed to.

That is to say if you see me following a new account, assume this is someone I've paid attention to for a while and have decided to dedicate more of my attention to because their work is important.

Not following anyone means I am responsible for my own engagement

I have 18,000 followers on Twitter, yet my engagement with people on Twitter went down significantly when I unfollowed everyone. My hypothesis is the algorithms surface my tweets less frequently to people I don't follow back. That means if I want engagement, I have to do more work. Which would be a bad thing if I had a normal number of followers, but is less of a problem because I am privileged with a very high number of followers.

In other words, if you don't have thousands of followers, unfollowing everyone on Twitter may turn Twitter into a very lonely experience. Which may or may not be what you want.

So, when I want people's attention I have to work for it. In my case that's a good thing because it forces me to really engage with people, and turns the noise down when I don't want or need it. On the downside it means when I have something important to say it doesn't always reach the people I want it to reach. Which hurts my fragile ego but is in reality perfectly OK. Nothing I say warrants a bigger platform than anyone else.

Experiment no more

When I unfollowed everyone at the beginning of 2020, I thought it would be a short-term experiment. I carefully stored my original following list and put everything in place so I could restore my entire list with the same tools I used for the Great Unfollowing. 21 months later I have no idea where that original list is and I have no intention of re-following all those people.

The lists work very well for me, especially when I view them using TweetDeck . Putting a taxonomy layer on top of Twitter has made the never ending stream of our collective consciousness into something more meaningful, and my consumption of content on the platform something useful to me.

This strategy - of unfollowing everyone and putting them in lists - is extreme and runs counter to how Twitter is supposed to be used, but the platform affords no other options.

So, for the foreseeable future my following count will remain at zero, or sometimes one, in my ongoing effort to tame the pretty hate machine.

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Senior Staff Instructor at?LinkedIn Learning ?(formerly Lynda.com) focusing on?front-end web development and the next generation of the web platform . He is passionate about diversity, inclusion, and belonging and works every day to build bridges between people to foster solidarity. Morten still doesn't know what artifact to give the museum. Design is political. Code is political. Hope is a catalyst.

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Photo by Akshar Dave ?? on Unsplash