Its this awful carryover from stuff like MySpace and Facebook. It needs to die, most people are just followed by bots at this point. I'd like to see some new metric, like "engagement points". I'm sure someone could game that and it would be just as scammy, but off the cuff engagement is more important than follows to me
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That's a good idea - one potential metric could be something like "average zaps per note".
Another way you could fix the Follower problem would be to make following someone cost some nominal fee in sats - could be pennies but would rapidly become cost prohibitive for bots to follow everyone under the sun like they do now, much in the same way that physical junk mail has costs that limit their reach. One problem is bots would then predominantly only follow prominent people. In that case, one could make the fee adjustable so a prominent person could charge more before you can follow them.
Further to this, for individual users the cost can sometimes cancel in an "I follow you, you follow me" scenario.
Just get rid of the count. Other than Internet dick measuring & influencers deciding how much to charge to shill products on their feed, what does follower count actually tell me about a person? They attract a lot of bots? They are a default follow on Primal? 😂
I'm not sure how charging to follow would work anyway, as it's just a list of npubs you sign with your key. There's not a central server managing it.
Good point.