In line with the earlier re-write of my about page here at Tumblr, I took a dispassionate look at the scarily huge list of tumblogs I have followed in the past, and thought “I have the day off work today let’s do this”.
When you’re following several hundred tumblogs, and you have no idea who 95% of them are, how on earth do you go about weeding them out?
I decided to be brave, picked up a virtual axe, and started chopping. In some kind of “order of swipes of the mighty axe”, I unfollowed
All those who had not posted in at least a month
All those who did not have a normal mugshot as an avatar
This chopped the number down to something far more manageable. While doing it, I realised there were a number of great Tumblogs that I didn’t want to lose altogether (such as Wordboner, and PinkOfTheInk), so started a new folder of bookmarks in Chrome to keep them for future surfing excursions.
The remaining couple of hundred tumblogs became subject to an entirely different massacre;
Open ten tumblogs in tabs in Google Chrome
Inspect each one for style and content
Remove if only reblogs
Remove if no writing
Remove if horrible to look at
Repeat
It seems to have produced the desired result - the dashboard is somewhere interesting to visit once more. Now I’m waiting for the backlash from all those I unfollowed