First Impression

I use Twitter for two main purposes:  promoting my writing and collecting news stories for my writing.  Because I’ve discovered that the latter task is made far more difficult if there’s too much traffic in my timeline, I never follow more than 200 people at a time and I don’t do “courtesy following”, and I often mute retweets from people I follow if they retweet a lot of stuff I’m not interested in (including porn).  Furthermore, my Direct Messages are not open to people I don’t follow; far too many time-wasters think its OK to flood a sex worker’s DMs with “hi”, “avail?”, dick pics and all the other idiotic garbage they try in text messaging.  That means if a person finds me on Twitter and wants to interact with me, the only way to do so is by replying to one of my tweets or starting a new one with my handle in it so it will show in my notifications.  Since I like being accessible to my fans, I watch my notifications pretty carefully, but of course any fool, sophist or troll can address me that way just as easily as my fans can; what this means is that if some prohibitionist, cop or other moron with a big following decides to attack me, his or her mindless minions will follow and clog up my notifications.  This jams up my Twitter and makes it difficult to see worthwhile responses, just as a wanted letter can get lost in a mailbox crammed with junk mail; furthermore, my time is valuable and I have exactly zero patience for ninnies and cretins trying to lay claim on it without paying me.  And that, my friends, is the reason for my legendary hair-trigger muting:  decent, sensible people can interact with me for years without once tempting me to mute them, but prohibitionists, sophists, trolls, partisans and bootlickers can’t usually tweet me twice without being banished to the outer darkness where they can shout into their own arseholes all day long without the slightest chance of annoying me.