| HN Mirror

Funny thing was that I'd developed this strategy on G+. It took me years to arrive at it.

And no, G+ "Circles" were hardly straightforward or convenient to use.

But the notion of restricting your highest priority follow list to a small set (10 -- 50 profiles or feeds, and less is definitely more here) is key.

Over time that list will likely grow, but more because many of the feeds have fallen silent or infrequent. Pruning the departed actually takes some work, and is something I'll do maybe once a year or so.

The way I'd arrived at this though was that I'd gotten desperately sick of G+ (and Google) at one point, and having initially followed many, many profiles with abandon, I pruned off virtually all of them, leaving a small core I particularly cared about. Ironically, as I was trying to make myself less dependent on the network, not more, my stream quality improved immensely. Virtually all of the annoying bullshit, even if only vaguely annoying, vanished. The people I was left with largely knew me and interacted with me regularly, and had things to say I found interesting.

G+ is gone, but I've carried through that strategy to Mastodon (still relatively active, though I've taken a break much of this year) and Diaspora* (dying its slow death, but something I'll still check into a few times a year). A small but interesting curation still proves quite compelling. A key realisation was that the voluble streams which do occasionally produce an interesting insight will almost always have those forwarded by others I do follow directly, allowing me to rely on them (or their own upstreams) for curation.

It's also given me insight into mechanics from the age of print newspapers and magazines: when a local region had its own publication (as with newspapers), syndication or curation would gather content from elsewhere, and major stories tended to get carried locally. It might seem that distant publications produced exemplary content, but in truth what I'd read was creamed off the very top, and digging further into such a source often proved disappointing. I keep that in mind with current social / algorithmic / stream-based media. Economics of print publication mean that that former behaviour is largely lost to us now, but high-quality periodic publications (The Economist, Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the like) can remain worth picking up and reading even now, should you happen across a physical storefront actually carrying them. Might even choose to subscribe should the desire be strong enough.

To be clear, G+ Circle Management was a tedious, largely unrewarding, PITA, both in general and in the specific mechanisms provided through the G+ interface. Though pruning was quite often quite rewarding.