• 2 mins
I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m not a big fan of social media. Compared to my peers, you could even say I’m not addicted to Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, or Twitter. But today I decided to unfollow everyone and only follow a select few. I was inspired by Jason Zook’s Twitter experiment, which you can read about here.
I started off following almost a 1000 people and after a couple hours of cleaning, I am down to just 56 people.
A few things I noticed:
- I was following at least 13 VC’s or VC firms
- At least 46 people claimed “founder” or “co-founder” status and 12 claimed “CEO” status
- At least 12 claimed they were “entrepreneurs”
- Most were developers, product/service brand accounts, or involved in the start up “industry”
Notes on my observations.
- Not surprising as I’ve been following startups and VC’s for years.
- I say at least because after a while I stopped saving people into what ended up being 39 lists. Also, these lists are more like tags in that people could be in multiple lists so there is some discrepancy.
- I have so much to say about this mostly because I dislike and disagree with how the media portrays startups and entrepreneurship. But regardless, it’s not surprising that entrepreneurs would be on Twitter and that I would follow them.
- Not surprising at all. As a C.S. major, I do a lot of programming not to mention that software engineer is one of the most common career paths for this major.
My goal was to:
- Follow people that actually talk and interact with others, not just promote their own work or sell their products/services,
- Ignore “high profile” accounts, CEOs of major companies. I can find them anytime if I am looking for them specificially.
- Follow people not brands/company accounts.
- Follow people active in the past month, and
- Follow makers, because I like trying new things.
All in all, I think I did a decent job. It’s not 20, the number of people @jasondoesstuff or other people have but it feels much better than the nearly thousand people I was following before. I still follow a few inactive accounts and a couple brands/companies, but I am satisfied with my new list.