I follow anyone that interests me with either their post, their comment and even a few times their username. Then I work backwards from there. If they start posting things I don't like then I unfollow them. It's not the ideal way to do it, that's for sure. I follow the maximum number of people and as new people filter in and I want to follow them, I have to unfollow someone else. It's getting harder to do though, because I increasingly recognize all of the people I'm following from a past conversation etc. mk follows only a few people and I know for a time being kleinbl00 followed nobody and was only following tags and using the global posts. We are still a small enough community that this can work and you really won't miss much but as we grow, and we are growing, that will become more of a fire-hose to keep track of. I've mentioned that there should be a "clear" switch for you to start over and start following people all over again. I also don't think there should be a limit to the number of people you follow.
Wait, there is a maximum? Also, it would be nice if you could sort the list of people you follow by a few different attributes, like "how recently they've posted" or "how recently you've shared something they posted". It would help to eliminate the flak.
I think that is a strong idea and it would probably be very helpful to you and you're overzealous following patterns. :P As a purging tool it would definitely be helpful, but I've mostly been trying to come up with any sort of idea to discover users, not purge them after you've discovered them. I've been thinking a bit about having some sort of user discovery page like the tags page but I'm not certain how it would work. I think it would encourage the users to follow those people who already have a ton of followers and deeper the "rich get richer" phenomenon that we've started to see. Also, scalability wise, it wouldn't work for long. People have already noted the tag page getting a bit overwhelming. I find myself going through chatter or the global pages looking for gray names to see who these people are, what they post, how long they've been on hubski, etc. Obviously, not optimal but yeah. Food for thought. Perhaps we can add this to the agenda for next talk. b_b do you have any opinion on user purging/user discovery?
Apologies for derailing the thread thenewgreen, but how is Hemingway?