Why I stopped following you on Twitter

I've reached the point where I'm ready to reconsider how I'm using Twitter, and part of that is reducing the number of people I'm following.  I'm losing the good tweets among all the noise, and I don't want to play the game where I follow you, but I don't listen to you, in the hopes you'll listen to me.  It's a party where everyone has a bullhorn and earplugs.  So my big criteria is: if you're following more than 1,000 people, I'm dropping you (yes, I'm making some exceptions for very entertaining people, or people I know).

So I'm having fun right now removing people.  If you remove me in return, I don't blame you.  These are the tweets that will get you dropped in a hot second:

1. "Want to make lots of cash?  I got fired, but now I'm rich working from home!"
2. "@garymccaffrey has a crazy idea. 19,530 new twitter followers in 30 days?..."
3. "Good morning Twitter followers!" 
4. "Yay, I just reached 5,999 followers--who will be my 6,000th follower?!"  

Here are some reasons I will give you the gimlet eye, and consider whether or not you're worth following:

• #followfriday 
• "I am laser focused"
• "Tip, #hashtags can be used to tag stuff you tweet!"
• "Just got back from a great run" 
• "New Blog Post: I am so alone" 

Please share the tweets that make you drop people. 

Comments

[Jamie Reygle]

I'm fairly new to all this, but the people I tend to drop are ones that aggravate me with their posts.

I often find these posts are politically related, and I find myself saying things I know I'll regret, then dropping them. I'm sure a lot of other people don't bother saying anything when they read me saying something inflammatory - they just drop me on the spot!

Oh well.

[Chris Lunt]

If you're liberal, and you like to be angry, search for #tcot. If you're conservative, and you like to be angry, search for #liberal. I haven't dropped anyone for political views yet, although I have dropped people for spelling errors. And spelling errors seems to show up in political rants a lot.

[Kristen]

I have a 1,000 plus rule, too. Honestly, I'd rather network well with 200 people than deal with all the noise of a thousand.

I also drop people who tweet about what happened on television shows they've already seen in another time zone when I'm sitting here in California waiting to see the deal with what is going to happen on Lost!