What I Learned From Unfollowing You

A case for Twitter

Tom Jones/Getty

A few weeks ago, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter—just over 2,000 accounts. It was a list I’d been building up since 2014, which is the last time I “nuked” my feed and started anew. Last time, I wrote two long pieces for BuzzFeed News about the experience. Those pieces are cringey now, partly because the internet I’m describing feels quaint and outdated. Back then I, like others, was very interested in following the day’s news in real time, whatever that meant. Here I am describing my foolish attempt to monitor tweets as they hit my feed:

Going into 2014, my feed had become intolerable. During big news days, [it] would move quicker than I could read it. Lately, Tweetdeck's internet client began to fail me, lagging under the weight of nearly 2,000 constantly chattering voices. The noise had overpowered the signal. I found myself wondering, at times, if the signal still existed at all.

An unbelievable amount has changed since writing that. I do not know a single person who still shares any kind of social-media-completist aspirations, especially on a platform like Twitter. The problem of the news of the day not reaching me is no longer a concern—in fact, it’s the opposite. Every morning, the news busts in through the walls of my consciousness like the Kool-Aid man.

The other thing that happened is, of course, the last eight years of life here on Earth. It’s been a time to be alive! And that has influenced the way we use our online platforms to construct our own digital identities and talk to each other. And not in a great way.

A concern that’s endured for me since 2014 is finding that elusive signal in the noise. What has always hooked me to the platform (besides the endorphin boosts of instant, algorithmic feedback and the ability to promote the work I do) is its flatness, by which I mean the ability to reply to almost everyone and conceivably be seen or heard by anyone. The same goes for the ability to peer into, and participate in, most conversations on the platform. Users are able to weaponize this for harassment (although Twitter now allows people to set rules for who can see and reply to them). But it also allows for serendipity. For many, that might mean brief interactions with famous people; in my line of work, it means being able to strike up a conversation with a source, or a witness to something I care about. It means lurking in a long back-and-forth between two experts on a subject I’m trying to learn about, and then reaching out to them to learn more. These interactions, when they happen, feed my curiosity, open my mind, expose me to sources of information that I’d have zero chance of finding on my own, and often inspire me to amplify that work or build on it with my own.

This is an idealized version of the platform and specific to what I do. For most people, the experience probably isn’t that deep. They’re on the platform to be entertained by drama and funny tweets, or to keep up with news, sports, or other interests while sitting on the toilet. No shame or judgment! I am the sicko in this situation.

Anyhow, eight years in, my Twitter feed had come to resemble a party that I’d stayed at for far too long. I watched people I’d developed parasocial relationships with morph into villains or curmudgeons or get famous. I saw a lot of people become the person their followers wanted them to be, which is never good. I knew I’d changed quite a bit, too (I gained about 170,000 followers, which definitely colored my experience). It was getting late; I was coming down and getting edgy, but trying to push back the dawn and my anxiety by staying at the party.

I was, finally, frustrated and jaded every time I opened the app. I found myself giving my attention to loads of people who I fundamentally believed did not deserve it. The dissonance in that action was making me feel awful, and to make myself feel better, I sought out more of what made me feel awful, so that I could feel superior. Dumb stuff, I know. But, like many, I’d become more addicted to things that made me feel outrage or even anxiety. I told myself that Twitter was no longer a place I wanted to be, which was true. But perhaps what was more true is that the version of Twitter I’d built for myself was no longer the place I wanted to be. So I killed it.

How to Do It:

Since Twitter doesn’t make it easy to unfollow everyone (and the manual process is hellish if you have more than a few hundred accounts), the best way to unfollow is to find a script that will do it for you. The one I found worked for me. I unfollowed 2,044 accounts in about 25 minutes by clicking a few buttons.

What It Felt Like:

A bit like this:

Pat Gaines/Getty

I’m ashamed to admit that the experience was, as I also remember it from 2014, strangely emotional, in the way that therapy can be emotional. The script I used flashed some of the accounts as it unfollowed them, which it seemed to do chronologically. I watched my personal eras on Twitter get systematically nuked. I saw changes in beats and emerging areas I’d monitored flash by: crypto, COVID, privacy, far-right extremism, disinformation, politics, tech and systems research, friends, co-workers, dormant brand accounts … bye! For a whole host of (probably unhealthy) reasons, it felt a bit like I was setting fire to a library of information that I’d been carefully curating. I got this creeping (and incorrect) sense that I’d now be unable to do my job. I felt bad and guilty but also a bit … euphoric? It felt like a giant weight had been lifted. For every great account excised from my list, there were probably four that needed to go. That part felt phenomenal and almost embarrassingly empowering.

Rebuilding

Here’s what I wrote in 2014 about reaching “Twitter zero”:

The strangest thing of all was the feeling of isolation. My once-kinetic feed was now nearly static, but I knew that Twitter—my old Twitter, your Twitter, Twitter at large—was still happening around me.

It was, I noted, like losing your hearing in the middle of a dinner party. This time, I saw the artifice that’s central to the experience of whatever it is that we each call Twitter (or any feed). Yes, each platform has a distinct history, culture, customs, architecture, and algorithmic design that influences every user’s experience. But as I sat there staring at a feed composed of only my dumb tweets, it was hard to see my experience as anything other than something that I build for myself.

To begin rebuilding, I asked my followers to share some good accounts that “curate their feeds really well (always sharing good/weird/interesting stuff).” It was an attempt to try and find more of that serendipitous, mind-expanding, and delightful stuff. It mostly worked. Some of the good finds included a list of 100 ocean scientists and conservationists, a few accounts like this one that curate really interesting videos and links about physics and science. I got a whole host of names of great people I used to follow who definitely belonged back in the feed. The recommendations were far from comprehensive, but good/smart curators proved to be a great base. My feed quickly started to show me new and different stuff. The new follows were amplifying interesting stuff from other accounts—ones I’d never seen before—and so I followed a few of those, too. My network grew, but looked very different than before.

Mostly, I basked in the quiet strangeness of the new feed (while adding some news folks to keep it functional for my job). I started to think about what, if anything, makes a Twitter account valuable to others, and I posed that question to people on Twitter, too. Here are some of the responses.

I loved this one from Dan, about finding people who help put words to things you’ve been feeling but can’t express:

Good aggregators/no clout chasing:

One that came up a lot was niche subject-matter knowledge:

Or, similarly, on-the-ground reporting:

Sometimes people gave reasons for unfollowing, which focused on accounts becoming too negative or noisy:


But the best observation and articulation I came across was this one:

My favorite Twitter accounts are portals that provide those “weak ties” to other networks of knowledge. The famous weak-ties theory, which came from Stanford sociology professor Mark Granovetter in the 1970s, remains relevant to our internet-connected social networks. Casual contacts or even strangers with shared cultural or relational connections are crucial to how ideas develop and how we learn.

When Twitter is working well for me, helping me learn or discover new things, it seems to be because some of my stronger ties on the platform (people I know well, colleagues, people in information areas I have decent knowledge of) are often creating weak ties for me by sharing things they’ve found (often from weak ties in their networks). They are opening up a portal to an interest or an idea or an argument that I’m unfamiliar with; I can enter it, follow them, and find a whole new series of weak ties to add to my network. By sharing what I’ve discovered, I can do the same for people who follow me, and that network grows.

This last happened for me at the onset of the pandemic, when Twitter provided an unending feed of infectious-disease and public-health experts who legitimately helped me understand a subject I knew little about. Twitter worked well in that tense and scary moment—before the usual incentives kicked in and scientists began to be harassed, some experts turned into clout chasers, and content was weaponized and misconstrued.

This all tracks with core ideas about sociology and social networks. But if you’re like me, you rarely think about your internet experience this way. After eight years of not doing much maintenance on my feed, a lot of my weak ties became stronger—not necessarily because I got to know those accounts as people, but because I have essentially been at the same party with them for close to a decade. You’re all telling the same jokes, taking part in the same unspoken but painstakingly adhered-to customs. Some people in the networks become truly awful; others get better or leave. Mostly, things stagnate, or get just a little bit worse every day.

The Bigger Picture

Because Elon Musk seems to be finalizing his purchase of Twitter, I think there are some lessons here. The technologist Emily F. Gorcenski recently wrote about leaving Twitter, and touched on some of what I’ve been talking about here. She says Twitter has never seemed to understand its core value:

The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.

Elon Musk has a bunch of half-baked ideas for the platform, some of which, as I’ve written, could send it back to a time when the noise was so loud that it threatened to silence the signal altogether. And while I agree that better tools to cut down the noise should always be the first order for Twitter, I also think giving people access to new portals of information is extremely valuable.

I’ve always been intrigued by an idea Jon Evans proposed in 2016: Make Twitter feeds into various apps that people can plug into.

I have a not-especially-modest proposal for how to solve almost all of Twitter’s problems. It’s very simple: let third-party developers build feeds. Extend their API and allow external developers to design, and users to install, custom tabs with custom feeds. So a user’s Twitter interface could include the Twitter-built Moments tab, if for some demented reason they actually wanted that … or, instead, an NBA fan who lives in Toronto could have a custom-built NBA feed, and a custom-built Toronto feed.
Or the StockTwits feed. Or the Nuzzel feed. Etc etc etc. All built by third parties– who share the income from “Promoted Tweets” within their feeds. Sure, give new users a default, Twitter-built curated feed. But also let them choose from a “Featured Feeds” list … or, better yet, from the Feed Store.
In short: make feeds Twitter’s apps.

I’m not sure how well this would work in practice, but Twitter’s subcultures—which many power users build their feeds around—are what make it great. Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote about the importance of Black Twitter to broader culture, but also to Twitter as a platform.

Black Twitter is not a place or a group of people but a set of communication practices, like signifying and call and response. It is also a group of knowledges—for instance, a genealogy of misogynoir. And it includes shared language, culture and references. Above all, Black Twitter is a repository, as when it archives public memory of cultural events … Twitter’s significance is not about revenue or advertising platforms or new features. It is about communities that create ideas.

I couldn’t agree more. As McMillan Cottom notes, the ideas and the communication style that started in the Black LiveJournal community “seeded Twitter’s style and purpose. This style influences every facet of new and legacy media. That is not an overstatement. It has rewritten the acceptable bounds of discourse on politics and culture and economics and policy.” Those ideas and stylistic elements spread partly because of Twitter’s flatness, and the portal-like experience of finding new subcultures through weak ties.

Maybe the idea that Twitter can be better is naive, and the platform’s architecture and our cultural incentives will kick off a race to the bottom every time. But when I unfollowed everyone, I felt a real loss—and carefully rebuilding my feed was a surprisingly hopeful exercise. It reminded me of the early days of social media, where discovery brought a thrill instead of dread.

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.