Why I Unfollowed Everyone On Twitter (How I Did It)

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Has your Twitter experience become ruined over time because you are following too many accounts? Read on, this will change your life. For real.

Clutter. If there was one word that could really describe my Twitter feed, it would be clutter. It’s not something that I had planned (obviously!), it’s just something that happened. After years of building up my profile, interacting with hundreds of very interesting people, following brands and publishers I liked, following back people who had followed me too, my Twitter had just become too hard to handle, as I was following over 11,500 users.

.@GeoffDx: If there was one word that could really describe my Twitter feed, it would be “clutter.” Not anymore. #reboot

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Twitter, like most of the other social media platforms, has worked hard to make sense out of our feeds and prioritise the content it thinks we want to see. But when you follow that many accounts, it’s just not enough to cut through the noise.

My Twitter account before (11,500 following)

Today, I decided I needed a reboot.

I wanted to start from scratch again, and only follow the accounts I really wanted to follow.

I had been looking for ways to clean up my feed. I tried lists but they are not very user-friendly. I tried several “unfollow” services that let you unfollow users based on different criteria, like if they have no profile picture, or haven’t tweeted in a while, or simply never tweet in a language I can understand. However, these services only let you unfollow a few dozen accounts at a time, and I just did not have the time to do so. So I turned to Google and found that there were quite a few Chrome extensions that provide mass unfollow services. After a few mistrials of extensions that just did not work, I came across “the one.”

Twitter Unfollow All (you need to use Chrome for this) is extremely simple to use. Add the extension to your Chrome, head over to your Twitter, click on “Following” to access the list of all the accounts you follow and then click on the extension within your Chrome browser. A few info pop-ups later, the extension will start doing its work, unfollowing all accounts.

It’s not magic. It will take time. It took about 1 hour for it to clean up my following, but that’s probably because I was following over 11,000 accounts. I must admit, though, that the very sight of the cleaning up was very satisfying.

My twitter account after the cleanup

I have since started following accounts again. Publishers I want to hear from, brands I love, people I really want to follow. Twitter has changed for me, it’s a better place now.

I know what your next question will be: did I “lose” many followers in the process?

It is still early to say, really. My gut says yes, I will probably lose thousands. Nonetheless, these thousands will not be missed. If your only reason to follow me is that I had followed you in the first place, then you might have clicked on the follow button for the wrong reasons. Plus, you probably never really interacted with my content, so no, you will not be missed.

It’s only Day 1 after the “purge,” but I’m loving Twitter again.

.@GeoffDx: “I unfollowed everyone and now I’m loving Twitter again. #reboot – read how I did it.”

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P.S. Hit me up in the comments if you think I should follow you.