In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good job of providing a manually-curated form of discover on the platform until Twitter itself started suggesting accounts to follow, thus causing a whole host of massively negative unintended consequences.

But! There's no reason we can't just keep recommending accounts that others should follow. To that end, here's the list of Twitter accounts I was following at the end of 2020. Almost all of them are super interesting! I've unfollowed them all, at least for now, as part of my annual digital reset, but I would still strongly recommend you check the out.

If you're on a social platform where you can do so, maybe use your voice to amplify people and accounts that could use more attention for their ideas or creations, and see if we can get people to stop relying so much on algorithmic recommendations on social networks. In the early days of blogging, as I noted in my piece on the lost infrastructure of social media, discovery was a lot more manual, but had a lot more personality, with "blogrolls" (a list of recommended blogs to check out) being a pretty much fundamental part of the navigation of a personal website. It worked pretty well to help people discover new voices, and there's no reason it couldn't succeed the same way now, if we want it to.