Meta: Why I’m Not Following You On Medium

Now that I’m a month into my experiment in using Medium as part of my mental health regimen, I thought I’d take a moment to explain, among other things, why I’m not following you.

Managing my social media profiles, or, rather, managing who I’m following on various platforms tends toward being anxiety-inducing for me. (I most definitely am not Team Followback.) A few years ago I stopped all personal use of Facebook, deleting all my friends and follows. I now use it only to register for events and, primarily, to manage the page for my nonprofit. Over on Twitter I follow less than 250 people, and every few months try hard to get that down to 200. I consistently follow fewer than 100 accounts on Instagram.

Here on Medium, I’m more concerned with whether or not I am finding interesting posts related to why I am here.

Finding people to follow, who might only sometimes post things relevant to why I am here, strikes me as a distraction and would probably just aggravate me. I rely on tag searches (oh, hey, Your Friends @ Medium: why can’t we follow tags anymore?) more than anything else, and I follow a few publications (oh, hey, Your Friends @ Medium, why is it now so hard to find what my followed publications are posting?). Following people would clutter my efforts here.

I do participate, some: I highlight and I respond. So far, I’ve reserved claps for responses to me, and even then only ones I find especially useful or insightful; it isn’t automatic. Generally if there’s something I find interesting that a user with a different approach would clap for, it’s a post with passages to highlight or respond to, so I view the clap as redundant.

Since being here on Medium is part of my mental health regimen, the ways in which I manage my profile becomes part of that.

If you’ve followed me here and are wondering not only why I haven’t followed you back but why I’m not following anyone, it really is me, not you.