Today I realized that I passed a so-called milestone: 2000 followers. Usually, like it's the case for so many Steemians, i should celebrate profusely but the fact is that I was not in the mood, because let's be honest... There is only a very tiny fraction of those 2000 who have recently opened my article, read them, let alone clicked on the upvote button, and so on. Those past three months, my posts barely reach double digit upvotes. And I'm pretty sure this one won't break the sky either. 

But don't get me wrong: I'm not bitter or sad, because it's never really been my plan either to have the highest number possible of followers. Also, I have not been publishing with the same rythm as last year, when I used to post daily. And considering the huge increase of users we have had lately, it's not surprise that my posts gets a bit drowned into the mass. 

                    

That's why i'm pretty sure that 95% of those two thousands can't really remember clicking on Following and did it purely out of habit, politeness for a nice comment, curiousness about what would come next or repetition. 

Fair enough. We all do! Me too. Which made me look at my own "following" number, which is slowly but surely ballooning towards the 1300s!

And there, there is definitely something on which I have power... Let me explain.

                                 

I spent most of 2017 publishing, publishing, publishing again and investing as much time and effort as possible into my account in order to make it grow. I managed to make a nice amount of Steem, transferred it on the market, played on the exchanges, won and lost, and I have now a little cash reserve of Bitcoins and altcoins which I intend to stash away.

However I was not brazen enough as to sell all my Steem, and since Christmas after pondering what I could do with my left-overs Steems, I decided that the best thing was simply to repatriate them into my Steem account, power them up and treat as many people as possible with the increased Steem Power which was conferred to me thanks to that transfer. 

But there was a catch: with (relative) big Steem power comes big responsibility... I just didn't see who to upvote anymore... I don't know if that happens as well for you, but due to the numbers of users currently on Steemit, and the haphazard quality of the articles you can find, I really didn't know WHO or WHAT to upvote anymore. So, lately, 75% of my upvotes go to new users and introduction post. 

So, to cut a long story short, I realized that the only sensible solution was to start a good old-fashioned diet and to prunce the numbers of people I was following in order to make my Feed more manageable and to keep in contact with the people about who I care. 

So, I was wondering if anyone here had the same idea and have you applied it successfully to your account? Since Steemit has not yet found a way to design and offer a more user-friendly and manageable main page, I guess this is what we have to do in order to stay ahead of the deluge of lazy posts and copy-paste which constitute  half of the feed right now.

Of course, I'm going to start by Unfollowing most of the users who have not published anything in the last... let's say... 2 months. That's the easiest target and probably the biggest haul, because I imagine a lot of people simply abandonned Steemit, or lost their password or moved on to fresher pastures. 

                                                                          

But for the rest... How would you proceed? Have you trimmed your Following list already? How did it feel? Did it help with your access to fresh and authentic content  about relevant topics? Or are you just happy to let it grow and grow without control?