She writes about her reasons for not following people on Twitter, citing reasons like their being spammy, sales-oriented, and using Twitter only to broadcast their own blogposts, etc.

Since I don’t use Twitter anymore, I shall write this with Plurk in mind instead.

On Plurk, you can add someone as a friend or a fan. Then, by default, your friend’s Plurks will appear on your timeline. However, you can have the option of whether or not to follow said person’s Plurks. That is, you can be friends with someone, but be sneaky about it, and not follow his/her Plurks, so as not to create enemies (remember, one enemy less is always good), because although his/her Plurks irritate you, frankly, they could still be good friends.

In any case, I now have 149 friends on Plurk, and that is honestly quite a lot of noise, if I were to follow every single person. I estimate that I have (at any one time), unfollowed about 20 Plurkers on my friends’ list, for various reasons. I add some of them back after a while, but some I just cannot be bothered to, for the following reasons:

(1) You are whiny. The number one pet peeve of mine (pertaining to Plurking) is when people only come to Plurk to whine about how horrible their lives are, how depressed they are, etc. At other times, they don’t appear. Or worse, they are constantly there to whine! 28 times a day! Sorry honey, go write it in your personal diary or something. There’s only that many (cozy) emoticons that we can give you.

(2) You use Plurk to spam us. Be it your blog posts, your friend’s blog posts, your friend’s blog shops, your grandmother’s blog, your dog’s website, or your goldfish’s pictures, if all you ever post are links and images and Youtube videos, I am taking you off my timeline.

(3) You Plurk 14 Youtube videos. Consecutively. In different threads. I liken such people to those irritating species on the MRT who blast their music from their handphone speakers, thereby forcing everyone to listen to their choice of music.

(4) You are boring. This is probably the same reason why you I don’t talk to you on MSN anymore.

(5) You are stupid. I am all against discrimination, but there are always exceptions to the rule. I discriminate against stupid people, ignorant people, and most of all, people who talk without running their thoughts through their brains to see if it might possibly be interpreted by others as stupid / senseless / discriminatory / wrong. Of course, said people might not know that those thoughts are stupid because they are stupid. So off they go. I might have followed them just because they are my friends, or my friend’s friend. But stupidity really irks me after a while.

(6) You say something just for the sake of saying something. This is probably a common reason why I unfollow most of the 20 or so people I mentioned earlier. If you have nothing to say, it’s okay not to say anything! Please don’t feel accountable for our entertainment, nor that you absolutely have to Plurk 8 times a day to tell us what you are eating for meals and what bus are you riding on.

(7) I don’t like your face / your personality / you. I’ve only done this to one person before, though.

So what makes you unfollow someone with whom you are friends, or someone whose Plurks you have been following?

An afterthought: Have you also ever unfollowed someone, or muted someone’s threads just because they have irritating friends who reply with nothing but emoticons?