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Comment by tfgg | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I, and I suspect quite a lot of their users, stopped using Twitter for quite a while because the velocity was just too high, the signal wasn't good enough. The stuff you might have missed feature has actually made me use it much more, now I can actually catch those quality tweets.

I'm sure someone is going to tell me that I should unfollow more people, but that seems like a pretty crude and destructive method to try to increase the quality of my feed. I still want to see good quality tweets from the people who tweet a bit too much. I appreciate that use case (follow just a few accounts and read every tweet) though and definitely think they should cater to it.

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Well I'll say it then, you really should unfollow more people. To a point, the more you unfollow the better the signal to noise ratio improves. You just have to find that point.

It isn't crude or destructive at all because you will see those good quality tweets from people who are heavy users. You will see them when others who you still follow retweet the good ones. Your feed should be a solid mix of tweets you curated by following interesting people, and tweets those people curated for you by retweeting.

It can be a bit awkward to unfollow people you know because there is that social pressure to 'follow back' but this idea is worth it for the positive results.

To give a specific example, try unfollowing all local media outlets (newspaper, TV, radio) and instead follow one or two reporters whose feeds you find interesting. You will still see all the interesting local news and you avoid all the marketing and fluff that pollutes the media outlets' Twitter feeds.

I read every single Tweet in my feed every day and it only takes a few minutes. There is usually a ton of interesting and relevant stuff in there. I couldn't do this before, when I was following too many people.

Great advice.

I follow very few people I know in real life because they aren't interesting on Twitter. I don't feel bad about that — if you don't like what I tweet, you should unfollow me and we can still be real-life friends.

> It can be a bit awkward to unfollow people you know

Mute them. It works well, and if they are engaged with others you follow it is all there, uncensored. So it isn't as harsh as a block, and they generally don't know about you putting it in place because you can still interact when your friends do, or when you choose.

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