Having lost and lots of friends is a nice thing to have. The thing is you don't have lots and lots of friends. In fact, I can argue that true friends are really rare, you could count them with only one hand. How may true friends do you have? 4-5?
My experience with social media taught me that having too many online friends didn't make my visit on the platform better, in fact, it made it worse. I have 1500+ so called friends on Facebook and my feed is cluttered with so much junk. This is one of the main reasons I don't use it that much anymore. Fortunately, you can hide some of the things they post.
This applies to all social media, the difference with Steemit is that the content here is king. Only the good posts are supposed to make it and only the best authors should succeed. It's a real competition of content quality! In that sense, Steemit is full of interesting people and it takes an enormous amount of time to read and interact with all of them. I have a hard time following 200 people, not to mention if I had a thousand.
There are steemians who follow too many people, it's their choice. I choose to follow a small heard of people I like and really engage with. Steemit is not about building up big numbers on your profile, it's about sharing good information, ideas, and interact. So every now and then I clean my feed by unfollowing people who resteem too much or are not active at all.
Check out http://steemit.deadfollowers.info to see who are your inactive followers.
An actual graph of my social activity.
My Issue With Resteems
Resteems are great but when only 1 or 2 posts out of 10 are original and everything else is just resteems my feed gets cluttered with posts I don't really want to read. Too bad there isn't an option to hide them, I hope this feature gets implemented. If this was possible then things would have played differently.
So, yeah, I don't follow. If I followed you and unfollowed you, please don't take it the wrong way. It's nothing personal. I'm grateful to anyone who supports me, and I'm happy to support him back, but I do believe that less is more. And if I unfollowed you, it's my fault, not yours. Friends?
Dunbar's number
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships. - Wikipedia
Robin Dunbar gives an interesting TED talk on the subject can the internet buy you more friends.
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TL; DR
I think we should have a better way to organize our Home feeds. I want to be able to filter out my dead followers and hide resteems by authors I don't want to follow.
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I see what you mean. There should be a way to prioritize our feeds. There are people here who I want to be top in my feed all the time and others are more limited like ones I follow for specific things like recipes. photography, artwork, etc. Hmm something to work on...
I don't want to compare Steemit in any way to Facebook. But they give you options what to see on your feed. I hope in the future, Steemit will work on these things. It's all about the user-friendly experience.
indeed, and it's entirely interface side. Sooner or later someone will make a good search engine, google is rubbish, for this task.
I recommend rolling over usernames of offenders filling your feed with junk and selecting 'unfollow'. I have a lot on my list but I don't really watch it much, so I will be looking to drop a few here and there probably also.
Thanks. I'm just trying to get the best out of the platform.
Wow - an involved analysis right upto the Dunbar number for the number of sustainable social relationships!! I understand your pain on getting the home feed cluttered with resteemed posts. However, as a minnow who is trying to maximize reach, I am also wondering if it would not be great to have my posts resteemed. Thanks for the article.
I would not bother you with requests for following. If you feel inclined, I know you will take a look at my blogs and encourage. By the way, I have started writing my chains of thought articles for blogging the chain of though each wildlife picture inspired - instead of just posting pictures.
Cool. I'm following you already. I may not follow many people, but I do want to help people on the platform, especially minnows.
Wow - what an honor. A heartfelt thank you! Please leave comments on couple of articles I wrote - it will be a great encouragement as well as guidance for me. Thanks
hm, all 167 of my followers are real followers :)