Twitter is not great at many things, but it worked well enough for me until now. As much as I enjoy having a public persona on twitter, I primarily use it for arranging my social life. That was until I hit newsy combinator and techcrunch — my mentions filled up with people shouting so loudly, I couldn’t hear my friends anymore.

As a short term fix, I forced everyone who followed me to unfollow me (the block & unblock trick), using the command line client “t”, and locked my account. Let’s look at what it did to the graph:

In lieu of a public persona, i’ve set up a public account @tef_ebooks, which reposts all my tweets that aren’t replies. I doubt i’ll regain the 3696 people I bumped overnight (sorry!), but I’d rather inconvenience strangers than friends. Twitter didn’t really leave me with a better option.