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 The unfortunate reality is that people are lazy and nearly no one would curate to this degree. 

Many (now dead) social platforms have tried and it always turns out the same (remember circles in Google’s Facebook killer?)

I actually think the use of lists and having clients that allow filtering/switching feed content based on lists is a much more useful/manageable way for most people to accomplish this. 

It also allows you to take advantage of other people’s curation work so everyone isn’t forced to do all the citation themselves (which, again, they just won’t do). 
 I 100% second this!

All of this is already an option for those willing to curate. The incentives for curation just need to be stronger.

Ideas: clients enabling filtering on profile lists, changing the follow button to an "Add to Lists" button etc... 
 just pretend for a moment that you are geniuses like me and try to understand what im saying

"follow" is a psyop - like covid masking

think real life - do you "follow" anybody in real life ?

no, you simply have varying levels of interest in different people.

virtual reality should mimic physical reality, which is analog.

instead of following you should simply assign interest value to people.  for people who are retarded and can't do math they can drag a slider from "not interested at all" to "extremely interested" in this person and their content. 
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 when you join by default everyone is assigned "not particularly interested" value and your feed is simply based on notes that are most often reposted, quoted, liked and so on.

as you read this content you can check out the profiles of people posting it and adjust their value.

eventually those whom you rated higher than "not particularly interested" will push other content down the timeline.

you never "follow" or "unfollow" everybody.  you simply TUNE your timeline from a purely algorithmic one ( based on global engagements ) to one that reflects your personal preferences. 
 lists, chats, explore page and so on - are all crutches to try and compensate for the fact that your approach is fundamentally wrong

a truly brilliant approach like what i described does away with the need for all those things 

stop thinking in terms of lists and think of the network as a medium that connects the minds of many people into one

this can only be effectively accomplished using the same type of analog math as the brain itself uses

learn some AI if you can't understand what i'm saying 
 Yeah, labels runs afoul of this principle as well. Approaching it as a top down data-classification task will never work. But I think you could probably use low-friction user interactions to implicitly classify contacts. Youtube and Twitter have "show less of this" buttons, you could have buttons that indicate incremental changes in your interest in an account. Likes/reactions unfortunately don't serve this purpose, at one point I thought they might.