Are You Being Followed?

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… and who do you follow … and why? I find that I am following nearly 700 people and that about 1.5 thousand people are following me! This creates serious problems when I want to ‘Suggest’ a discussion to my followers because many of them have either long departed, are no longer active or don’t really actively follow what I do. Some of the people I follow are also no longer active. I try to follow people in whose discussions and other posts I am genuinely interested and with which I am likely to interact once in a while and I expect people to follow me for the same reason. There has to be some reasonable limit to this, of course, and I would expect no more than about 300 to be about the limit of manageability. I seriously need to reduce these numbers, therefore, so that I am only following people I’m really interested in connecting with and am only followed by people who actually show interest in what I post. Culling the ‘Followed’ list is pretty simple. There is an blue button saying ‘Following’ next to each one and I only have to click that to no longer follow them. Of course, it takes time to look at each person’s profile to see whether they are active and whether I want to keep following them or not. Reducing the number of people who are following you is not quite so simple. There is no button which allows you to stop them following you (thereby leaving only those you might want to ‘Suggest’ a discussion to on the list). The only way to achieve this is to go to the person’s profile, click ‘Block’ and then immediately ‘Unblock’ them (assuming, of course, that there is no reason for wanting to block that person). I can see that I have several weeks of concentrated work ahead of me! Most of the people I unfollow or remove from my following won’t know or care about it but if you happen to find that you are no longer following me when you thought you were, I apologise and would say please feel free to follow me again!