ronin - 3:26 pm on Jul 26, 2009 (gmt 0)

@JS_Harris Hadn't thought of that, but it might be a factor.

@Habtom I like to remain agnostic towards Twitter on the whole.

But it seems to me that those on Twitter who follow others regardless of how much boring trivia they churn out are rather like those who will go out to a disco and then throw themselves around to whatever Tiesto or Trentemoller mix the DJ lines up next, regardless of whether they actually like it or not (perhaps in the hope that the next mix will be better?)

This is no good at all.

Empty floors educate DJs. Sparse followings educate Twitterers. At least we can hope so.

If you stop following Trivia Tim because his noise-to-signal ratio is too high and if everyone else does the same one of three things will happen:

1) Trivia Tim will give up on Twitter: nobody wins and nobody loses.
2) Trivia Tim will persist with Twitter but no-one's listening: everyone wins except poor Tim, wasting his time tweeting into the ether, who loses.
3) Trivia Tim will be perceptive to the implicit feedback from his ex-followers and his signal-to-noise ratio will improve: everybody wins.

Of course this all requires people to pro-actively prune their Twitter follow-lists... and I suspect that the path-of-least-resistant aspect of human nature will see that as "too much trouble."