Is Unfollowing another Steemian considered insulting?
This thought occurred to me this morning while I was chatting to @steevc about someone who has ‘given up’ on Steemit and is now pursuing other avenues on social media.
I have a Facebook account and several times over the years I have requested a connection to someone I thought was a friend and have either been rejected or ‘left hanging’. The result is the same, its’ rejection.
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Should I feel hurt in this situation? If it’s someone I interact with on a regular basis in real life and have know for years, I think there is cause.
This person really doesn’t like me, and has some reason to say ‘NO!’ They could just say it to my face, ‘I don’t like you’, but their actions are effectively the same thing but hiding behind a wall to relay the message. It’s something I tend to remember and think about when I meet this certain person.
Facebook of course is different to Steemit in the form of the people you communicate with; you have probably never met them before in the flesh.
On Steemit I unfollowed this ‘given up’ person mentioned above maybe two months ago as I didn’t really feel like the content he was producing was of any interest to me. There was no other reason, but is this considered an insult to someone?
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I do go through my follower list every now and again and do a mini-purge. Recently I unfollowed a couple of Steemians; one had stopped visiting me and on further investigation he had done a serious purge to his followers. I noticed courtesy of GinaBOT that this person had unfollowed me in his major purge.
At this point I unfollowed him too, not out retribution dare I say it but simply because his content was never really of any interest to me.
The second Steemian, I took the initiative and unfollowed him only to be rewarded by an instant reciprocal unfollow! It does make me smile that ‘humans’ take things like a little personal, and I’m no exception sometimes.
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Steemain Two started using BOTS, to the $100’s level which I find a little odd. I make a stance on these kinds of people in the fact that if their post is already at $167.99 due to buying votes then my vote isn’t going to really make a lot of difference.
This is purely a personal thing I have, so I unfollowed him. It’s no great loss and we can now both pursue our ambitions on Steemit in the ways we deem good or otherwise.
Do you do a regular or irregular purge of your followers or do you let it grow in to the thousands like an overgrown garden? I would love to hear your views.
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.
There should be no retribution or guilt in unfollowing people, though perhaps if they are a close friend you should consider the message that sends (like it does in FB).
This is a blogging platform so you should use your friends lists solely to highlight content of interest to you.
The difference in Facebook is that you don't get an 'unfriend' message. You just notice over time. GinaBOT however tells you everything, so you see it right away.
In the case of Steemian Two I guess he uses it too as he was very quick on the trigger!
I would imagine most people aren't obsessed enough to be running GinaBot :)
Even if they are, if it isn't a friend you are not making a statement about why you unfollowed them. Their content just isn't of interest. I unfollowed somebody yesterday on Steemit.
GinaBOT is well used by many and by you I believe! I want my information on the go and its one of the best tools on offer.
There's a couple more I'm thinking of purging, no reason to keep them there if there's nothing of interest to view.
I may like someone's content and they may not like mine...that's ok to me. It works both ways. I follow some that don't follow me and vice versa. I don't look at these extra sites with extra info other than steemworld which tells me where my voting levels are up to. I feel sometimes too much info can be a negative distraction. I always look down someone's blog before following. People are bound to unfollow sometimes so it seems best to be hardened to it rather than get upset at all. If I were to be upset about such a thing I would take it as a sign that I need to have a break and take a walk in the woods or something like that.
Its not reciprocal at all and this is the same for me, I follow some who don't follow me and the other way is quite extreme as I have 5x followers than who I follow.
Yes...that raises another point. When I see someone following thousands of people I assume they will never see my posts and generally have less interest in reading the posts of others. More selective people seem to be more interesting to me.
I don't really know who follows or doesn't follow me. I would probably check to see if the person was worth winning back if I found out they unfollowed me. haha!
If I decide to unfollow people I will probably check my feed.
Those that never post, no need to unfollow they don't have an impact on my feed.
If they post crap vs. Sh*t I will probably unfollow to me crap posts are ones that do not interest me. However having said that if they are my friend I probably would not unfollow.
Depends on my mood. Basically there is no way I will see everyone's post even if they are great so I go like I did here to see what you are up to. Otherwise, if I forget you will visit me. Then my brain will say hey, time for a visit.
This is how I roll. I like #esteem much better for checking your post it does not throw you photo of your avatar in my face.
I've thought of doing a mini-purge of the people I follow, but for me, unfollowing tends to be an occasional thing. I've turned off "unfollow" notices in GinaBot, because honestly -- I don't want to know.
The content I write is not for everyone and I freely acknowledge that. If you're interested, great! (And I figure you'll stick around.) If not ... no hard feelings.
I am not at all into -- if you follow me, I'll follow you. You have to write things that interest me to stay in my line. So, if the only reason you follow me is hoping I'll follow you back, then you're in for a terrible surprise.
I'm perfectly fine following people who don't and never will follow me back. If they write stuff that interests me, I'll stick around. I'll upvote it. I'll recommend it. I'll put it in my curation posts. Good work is good work. Period.
I'll check out people who comment on my posts to see if we have anything in common. Usually we don't -- and that, too, is ok. I have a wide variety of interests, so you don't have to be remotely connected to my special niche for me to follow you and find you interesting.
In the beginning I was surprised to find how many people would write something great -- and I'd follow them -- and that was the only worthwhile thing they ever posted. (Believe me, that was discouraging.) So, after a while, I'll unfollow -- as you said, because their content just doesn't interest me. I wade through enough junk already on Steemit.
I deliberately search for interesting new people. (But if they aren't consistent, I'll soon be gone.) I find I unfollow people who resteem a lot of stuff I don't want to read, but on the other hand, I find some really interesting new contacts from good people resteeming other good people. So I guess that pretty much evens out.
I've lived long enough to know that very few are "my people." (Very, very few, in fact.) When there's a real connection, it's great. When it misses ... well, c'est la vie!
I don't consider it an insult either way. (BTW, not everyone feels this way for certain!! ) It does make me sad when I've spent a lot of time carefully writing something that interests me -- and that I think has value -- and then finding the right illustrations so it really is something I'm proud of -- to find others never want to hear from me again.
But it's not the first time -- and it's certainly not the worst time. As I said, I'd just rather not know. Besides, I enjoy my writing and my work more when I'm not worried about pleasing everyone. If it has value for me, I consider it was worth the time I spent on it. If it does someone else some good, too ... great!
The overwhelming majority of people say the same thing , 'I don't care if someone un-follows me', but is it some deep down form of rejection perhaps?
I can usually figure out why someone un-follows me, and its generally with merit, and then I would think., 'fair enough'.
I do rearrange my followers every now and then. Soley on interest of posts and interaction... should do it more often :)
I personally don't worry too much about it; if someone doesn't like my content I don't want to clutter up their feed. It happens to me a lot because I record and post music videos and some viewers/listeners are really into one particular style of music, and unsub or unfollow if my next post isn't jazz, rockabilly, or whatever style my previous post was. I don't think it's personal toward me, but personal to them. Greetings!
I agree @onnovocks
I seldom check who follows me, but focus on who comments on my posts. Sometimes, when I have little mental energy, I only get to answer the comments on my own posts, but I prefer to comment on all the quality posts I can - and to do that effectively I have to have a feed that is reasonably weeded out.
I do not revenge-unfollow - it really does not mean much to me and as I seldom notice, there is no harm in unfollowing me.
'revenge-unfollow', now there's a term for us. Neither do I really.. though in the example of Steemain (1) I did unfollow but not for this reason.
A lot of varied responses and good debate :)
I rarely get round to unfollowing people on Steemit. I occasionally do it if they're resteeming a lot of content that I'm not interested in, to the point that it's clogging up my feed. Sometimes I think someone I follow is putting out boring content, but when I look at their blog feed, I invariably find something that interests me, so I continue following them.
A while ago I unfollowed someone because it wasn't just that I disagreed with what he was saying – he was making sweeping statements condemning a wide group of people, but making no effort whatsoever to provide the slightest bit of evidence to back up his views. Usually I'd at least argue the point, but he was doing it in a arrogantly authoritative and pompous way, which really put me off.
With other social media, if someone I know doesn't respond to a friend request, it's usually because their account is inactive and they haven't posted for months. That doesn't bother me. I always refuse Facebook friend requests from people I don't know and/or whom I have no friends or interests in common with. A while ago I accepted a friend request from a neighbour who lives up the road, but whom I've never spoken to. It turned out she was operating a king of social media bingo site that you had to pay her to join, and I got bombarded with stuff like "Winner winner chicken dinner!" In the end I just silenced all notifications from her.
Heh.. I dont do new Facebook friends either now, its closed shop. I know what you mean about the resteem people, too many and you cant see the wood for the trees.
I must confess that I have never worried about "friending" and "unfriending" people on social media. Maybe because I rarely use the resident tools to track people I keep up with.
Mostly my interactions are sorted into bookmark folders of my own creation, which allow me to keep track of my "core group" and "2nd tier" and I also have one that's "Interesting but inactive" that I occasionally check in on... and then there's "everybody else" whom (I confess) I rarely get to.
One of the things Facebook and twitter DO have that I find lacking on Steemit is the ability to sort people I follow into "groups." I follow some 500+ people, and it's a LOT of work to keep up with them using the Steemit interface... which is basically just "a long list," as you know.
Would I unfollow someone? Maybe for similar reasons as you describe... if someone who "used to be interesting" became a sellout slave to bid bots. Or if they started posting plagiarized or abusive content.
Keeping track of 500 must be hard and you must miss things sometimes. You cant please everyone can you?
I guess it's human nature in a way. My view is that just because somebody doesn't find what I have to say interesting that doesn't mean I don't find what they have to say not of interest. Saying that I haven't followed everybody that has followed me - I find it all pretty hard to keep on top of.