Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Obsessive Completionism

I feel com­pelled to con­sume every last bit pro­duced in cer­tain dig­i­tal domains. Twit­ter users and RSS feeds are my lat­est vices; before that, it was Twit­ter and pod­casts, and before that, it was pod­casts and issues of The Econ­o­mist. And every yeah, the SxSW show­cas­ing artists tor­rents inter­rupts my music lis­ten­ing as I slow­ly go through it.

I’m not sure where this dri­ve comes from. I sus­pect it lies in an irra­tional extrap­o­la­tion, a strange assump­tion about qual­i­ty of con­tent: all past and future con­tent will be as valu­able, fun­ny, or inter­est­ing as what I’ve thus far consumed.

Over the past three years, I’ve slow­ly advanced through dif­fer­ent stages of deal­ing with this. Ini­tial­ly, I sim­ply threw time at the prob­lem, ded­i­cat­ing more and more time to read­ing in order to stay “caught up”. Next, I reluc­tant­ly pared back sources, as a lack of time or ener­gy forced me to choose between selec­tive per­ma­nent bank­rupt­cy (unsub­scrib­ing) or wide-spread tem­po­rary bank­rupt­cy (mark all as read). For what­ev­er rea­son, I was more com­fort­able mak­ing an unsub­scribe deci­sion than a mark-all-as-read deci­sion, pos­si­bly because it was eas­i­er to make a per­ma­nent judg­ment on a sin­gle site, rel­e­gat­ing them to the dust­bin, rather than toss­ing out per­fect­ly good news items sim­ply because their date of pub­lish­ing fell on the wrong week. RSS exam­ples are eas­i­est: the first sites to go were the high noise, high vol­ume, low sig­nal feeds like Digg, Boing Boing, and Slashdot.

As I got my RSS prob­lems under con­trol, Twit­ter picked up steam, and I began fol­low­ing more and more peo­ple. I’ve now gone through two Twit­ter purges, each of them only cut­ting back from around 300 fol­low­ing to 250. I find it dif­fi­cult to drop peo­ple one at a time, but like spring clean­ing, the sheer momen­tum of the first few unfol­lows puts me into a much more objec­tive mood. Twit­ter’s new fol­low­ing list UI makes this much, much eas­i­er, show­ing you the per­son­’s last tweet: this often reminds you of just why you’d been mean­ing to unfol­low them.

Late­ly, RSS has been eas­i­er to make these deci­sions with, and, iron­i­cal­ly, I’ve found that step­ping away for a few days and tak­ing a look at your aggre­ga­tor makes this exer­cise eas­i­er. Don’t read any­thing for a week; sort your feeds by most to least unread items, and ask, “Do I real­ly need to read all 300 items? How many good links or arti­cles will be in there? 3? 30? 150?”

The most impor­tant thing I’ve learned about this “obses­sive com­ple­tion­ism” is to know that it’s going on: it forces tough deci­sions about feed sources much soon­er, since you know that the vol­ume will even­tu­al­ly be overwhelming.

Twit­ter’s unsub­scribe inter­face will always be sore­ly lack­ing until can show “Tweets per day” the way Google Read­er can show “Updates per day”. High-vol­ume pub­lish­ers are rarely low-noise in any medium.

If you’re treat­ing Twit­ter as a mail­ing list, you real­ly are using it wrong. And if your par­tic­u­lar dis­or­ders (we all have them) require that, you’d prob­a­bly be hap­pi­er not using it. Any­thing else is just mitigation.

Allen: my long-stand­ing wish (and one that, giv­en enough free time, I’d prob­a­bly write myself) is a util­i­ty that shows you your fol­low­ing list, sort­ed by tweets per 24 hours over the last month. I’m will­ing to guess it’s one of those “30 of your 300 fol­low­ing con­sti­tute 50% of your dai­ly Twit­ter feed”.

Steven: *shrug* I mean, sure, “I’m doing it wrong,” but I’ve been doing it wrong since Decem­ber 2007, so I’d say it’s work­ing for me so far. There are a lot of peo­ple that, quite sim­ply, I do want to see all the tweets from; those that I don’t, I even­tu­al­ly drop.

Christo­pher, I think what I was real­ly try­ing to say is if some­thing has you run­ning at an 8/10 stress lev­el, it isn’t worth using. And if you’re real­ly that close to fig­ur­ing out who you need to drop on any par­tic­u­lar day, I think it’s prob­a­bly more stress for you than it’s worth.

Of course, if you’re still enjoy­ing it, go ahead. It’s just a thought. :)