Out of curiosity, what's the value of following 2000+ people on Twitter? I'm following about 100 and the noise is already incredibly counterproductive.

I don't read it all, but when i do open the twitter app, i like that it's all new content for as long as i can be bothered to scroll. And there are lots of interesting people out there.

edit: and 2000 users over 7 years is less than one new per day.

Agreed. I was at about 800 following and decided to trim down to 25-30 people. Unfollowing takes so long on Twitter I had to use 3rd party apps to speed up the process.

I had made a twitter account a long while ago but didn't really use it. A month or two ago I decided I wanted to start using it again but I had somehow started following 2000 people. I couldn't find a 3rd party app for unfollowing that didn't have me sign up for something so I used document.getElementByClassName(unfollowButtonString) to click all the unfollow buttons at once. Regardless of that hassle, finding and using inactive accounts is probably pretty easy for the people selling these follows. I imagine they just try passwords leaked from other services or applications or hire people to make fake accounts.

Which apps did you use? I have a difficult time unfollowing people. I try to purge my following list often, but I never make much progress.

Some that I used: justunfollow, unfollowers, and iunfollow(not sure if I used this one, looks familiar).

Each cap their fast unfollow feature to about 25 a day. So it took me about a week to get it down using all the services.

I was going to say the same thing. I've got about 50 followers and sometimes it's all I can do to not unsubscribe from half of them. I'd bet that getting to 100 is much harder to handle, and I can't even imagine 2000...

I recommend using lists. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of people you can add to a list but I haven't hit one yet. I typically follow only friends and people who I find particularly interesting but I put lots of other people on lists. The other benefit of twitter lists is you can divide accounts by categories. For instance I have a list called hackers that is only programmers, and a list that is only designers, etc. I find lists can give useful context to twitter and help pull some signal out of the noise.

That's interesting. Unfortunately the UI is all about "follow @user" buttons, lists not so much. I'm guessing browsing list feeds aren't as prominent in the mobile apps either, but I haven't tried yet.

Anyway the user hostile error messages I got when I tried to add following user #2001 - instead of a suggestion like yours, perhaps - made me lose interest in the whole thing.

The UX makes it pretty easy to add users to lists. You click on the gear next to the follow button then click Add/Remove from lists. And I'm pretty sure it's present in the mobile app as well.

Looks like it's there in the main mobile app. But what about embeddable widgets on websites? And now i need multiple taps to add a follower. And will it show "added to your list" status like it shows "following"?

Too much effort. Plus, it seems twitter thinks I'm using their service in the wrong way. If the way I like to use it is wrong, I guess it's better to just stay away, makes everyone happier.

I think the upper limit for one list is 5000 [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/TwitterForNews/status/340206438364368896

My problem with Twitter lists is that they're so hidden that I never browse them. They're not as prominent as your normal feed, which is front and centre.

To get round this problem I use TweetDeck, which allows you to have more than one column on display. I've only tried the desktop version and haven't tried any similar mobile apps though.

Thanks, that sounds handy. I'll check it out.

Flipboard can read twitter lists like a magazine.