15 Types Of People You Don’t Want To Follow On Twitter
The other day I did my monthly ritual of going through the people I follow on Twitter. The goal is to see who is providing good information or entertainment and who is dead weight that needs to be unfollowed. When doing this it quickly becomes clear that there are certain types of people on Twitter that you need to avoid at all costs.
1. Family Members
No one wants to picture their little sister as anything but a perfect innocent angel. Now imagine her tweeting about how drunk she got last night or posting picture after picture of her making out with random dudes. That experience is nothing compared to your Dad’s performance on Twitter. He surely will have an egg as his profile pic and will constantly be tweeting out his not-hot sports takes to his 6 followers.
2. Most people that you know personally
Twitter isn’t Facebook. On Facebook you have to suffer through endless photos of babies and relationship meltdowns involving people you sat next to in 8th grade English. Don’t put yourself through that on Twitter. This rule excludes your best friends. You chose to be close to them so now you have to follow along with their tweets no matter how uninteresting.
3. Athletes
The percent of athletes that are interesting on Twitter is maybe 2% and that might be generous. Their tweets will solely consist of either promoting products, complementing another athlete or saying good team win after their game. Now the few times when an athlete does really put themselves out there on Twitter it’s always great so go find those few and leave the rest behind.
4. Retweet Whores
I followed you. I didn’t follow your friends or some random people that you follow. If all you’re bringing to the table is the thoughts of others then I should probably unfollow you and just go follow them.
5. The Self Promoters
We all understand that Twitter is a great place to promote any projects or things that you’ve worked on. It’s very acceptable to occasionally tweet out links to your stories or retweet a review of something that you were in. The problem comes when that’s all you do. If you’re just going to constantly flood our feeds with your self promotion then you risk turning us against you and your project.
6. A-list Actors
A good philosophy for following people on Twitter is the more followers they have the less interesting they are. This is more a case of dealing with celebrities that are in the tens of millions in followers. As bad a follow as Justin Bieber is sure to be, many of the real perpetrators here are A-list actors. Go follow Robert Downey Jr. Have fun sitting through the endless retweets from people lying and saying that seeing The Judge changed their life. Or you could go follow Leonardo DiCaprio. Enjoy the Twitter silence until its time to talk about climate change. Riveting stuff that is.
7. The Praise Retweeters
These might be the worse people of all. They’re combining the biggest no-no’s by both retweeting random people but also constantly promoting themselves. Hey Big Sean we get it, everybody at your concert in Columbus had a really good time. Tom Cruise we all know Edge of Tomorrow was a fun movie but we don’t need to see a 140 character review of how awesome it was from Diane in Tampa.
8. Hot people just because they’re hot
I can admit this has been my biggest flaw on Twitter. You stumble across the account of a celebrity that you’re in love with and it seems like a no brainer to follow them. Be careful what you wish for because after only seeing tweets about their new perfume line and who their favorite stylists are the facade is gone. You don’t want to lose that idea of love in your head so just think twice before following. Kate Upton and I unfortunately went through this.
9. The Wannabe Twitter Comedian
We get you’re trying to get some attention by posting some funny and original tweets. That works well if the jokes are good and not just excruciatingly awkward misses. Not all zingers can be home runs but maybe workshop them around before sending them out.
10. Rappers
Name one rapper that is a good follow on Twitter. You can’t. There are a few that are accidentally funny like Rick Ross but other than that there aren’t any. A lot of musicians and especially rappers end up falling into many of the other unfollow categories as well. Their feeds are usually used exclusively for self promotion and retweeting praise. Occasionally you might get a tweet that starts a beef with another rapper but it’s not worth following just waiting for the chance that happens. Just wait for the retweet.
11. The Shit Talkers
When a celebrity or public figure tweets something go and look at the replies. It’s horrifying. People will just go off on them being incredibly disrespectful for no reason. A celebrity could tweet about how beautiful a day it is. Guaranteed someone will reply back how it must be nice to enjoy the day and not have to work a real job for a living. If you ever see someone you know do this then immediately unfollow. These are the kind of people that cost us the Twitter genius of Chrissy Teigen.
12. Politicians
Hopefully this one is obvious. No matter what your political views and preferences are there is no reason to follow a politician. The biggest issue is that they clearly don’t even handle their own account. Most of them probably don’t even know they’re on Twitter. If they were then I guarantee we would have gotten funnier tweets or maybe some Bulls updates from Barack. With that being the case there isn’t going to be anything said by them that will worth following for.
13. Fitness Accounts
You follow these for inspiration and while you do get some of that more often you just end up feeling bad about yourself. They make it feel like if you take some time to relax and watch some TV then you’re a lazy monster. Their biggest sin is retweeting pictures of delicious desserts. Do they find joy in torturing you? Just stick to following The Rock if you need some inspiration.
14. Anybody from Entourage
Entourage is an entertaining show with fun characters. If the characters from Entourage where on Twitter who wouldn’t want to follow Ari or Johnny Drama? Obviously no one would want to follow Vince but they can’t all be winners. Now in reality we just have the actors from Entourage on Twitter. Out of respect for the show you might’ve given them a follow. Turn back now. A person can only see so many drawings of Adrian Grenier’s face retweeted before they go mad. Let’s not even get started on whatever Jeremy Piven is doing on there.