Like many in the Twitterverse, I love the platform. It provides my main interface to following what’s happening, along with staying connected to interests both personal and professional.

Jumping off something James wrote yesterday, I’ve felt similar about Twitter’s utility the last year or so. It feels like I’m experiencing some sort of content creep — probably a function of an increasing number of accounts I follow and the neighboring universe of likes and retweets from that expanding footprint, which generates a massive amount of noise in the algorithmic feed.

I don’t spend a ton of time on Twitter anymore, but I do look at it multiple times a day. Unlike some, I actually like the algorithmic feed. The idea of seeing things adjacent to the folks I follow is an attractive one, but it’s gotten to be overwhelming with toxic content, topics I personally don’t want to see on Twitter (or at all), and can be overwhelming echo chamber on some topics when high profile events happen. I need to make the time (as James did) to purge the follow count down of the unnecessary. I did also discover muting topics recently, which has helped tone down the stuff I don’t care about — not via Twitter, at least.

Twitter’s had its Lists feature since 2009, but I barely got into using it before abandoning it and never going back. The process for adding and removing from lists and general list consumption has always been terrible, as if Twitter is likely to kill the feature at some point. James’s recommendation of TweetDeck definitely makes consuming the list feeds more manageable. I’m going to give that a try and set up a couple of topic-based lists to see how that works.