Follower count was def a mistake for us at Twitter
Maybe not a mistake, but def changes everything
Discussion
Why does follower count even matter anyway? Seems pointless unless you’re trying to flex so you can be an influencer of sorts.
Dopamine addiction. Same with likes.
It is important to know how many entities want to read you
I mean... given how many people make a living off being an "influencer" it does seem like follower count is a pretty important metric for many people.
But I agree. It should not matter. Engagement numbers with the content that is created should be enough for "influencers" to negotiate their rates.
Shouldn’t zaps for quality content kill the influencer model?
I'd say it will fuel it even more. First, you focus in making great content which will earn you actual money, so you make even more great content, and then when you have a huge following, you earn extra money from putting product placements into your great content.
Bow you just have to find the sweet spot where the product placement earns you more than the lost zaps from people who are pissed by the product placement (which should be trivial, most people don't give a shit).
So now, zaps actually enable wannabe influencers to bootstrap their "venture" since they can now earn a little money right from the start, before they even got really big.
damn typos 🙈will there ever be an edit button for Nostr? 🥺
Besides being polite I don’t see a reason for likes. What would be the effects of eliminating likes and follower count? You could still follow someone but it doesn’t need to show a count anywhere. No more likes or followers. Just put out whatever content you want and receive zaps from people that find value.
Likes / follower count can be signals that allow algos to pick the best messages out of an ocean of infinite noise. Of course likes and followers, being free, can be gamed, so zaps would be better.
Why have likes, zaps, reposts, etc? They are social signals to filter and/or measure the potential relevance of content and people. If there’s something that works better then sure it’d be great, but knowing that 10k people follow someone, while another has 40 followers is, in fact, useful. Same as when scrolling through 100 comments you might stop on one with a ton of likes to find it’s fucking hilarious & didn’t have to read an hour of garbage to find it.
The social networking sphere has 1,000,000x the data, people, comments & posts as what anyone can possibly navigate. All the “social signal” tools are just imperfect shortcuts to sorting through the ocean of social media to find relevance. 🤷🏻♂️
❤️ #[2]
Agree. It's all grist for the mill (useful information)
Yeah, I can see how it might provide signal or some sort of legitimacy to help sort through the noise. But, it’s better that it be organic and “earned.” In other words, follow me because I add value to your life. And, zap sats to me if you really enjoy or appreciate something. This is often not the case in social media. Instead, people pay for followers or even ask for people to follow them or like a post shared so they can reach a certain threshold/goal.
PS for the record I follow Guy Swann because I like the content and appreciate his contributions. 👍
spot on
I thought p we needed the follower count because this is how you know that one account is "better" than the other, but now that I'm thinking about it this is not necessarily true
Totally. IMO, the like / follower count feeds a starving narcissistic appetite, politicizes benign content, and reduces the dissemination of original thought.
Kind of reminds me of 8th grade kids jockeying to be popular for popular sake. Remember those kids that were popular and had a loud voice about things only because they were supposed to be the popular ones but were in reality quite an empty shell?
It’s interesting to say the least as to how it changes behavior & people’s perception of others. At times it seems obviously useful, while there are also absolutely cases where it seems to have very negative effects.
Not to mention so many people *do* care about it and it’s a major driver for them to engage at all. Hard to say what the net benefit or cost is, especially if bootstrapping a competing network. 🤔
Why was it a mistake? How else would you structure the people that provide the best (subjective) content that others want to follow?
If I had to argue in the negative, I could say it could shift focus from what is the best content, to the network effect of what *other people are looking at.*
Seems pretty easy to observe how much of content and connections occur completely reactionary to the social sphere. “Oh look 100k people follow this person, I should follow them.” And then you get this sort of feedback loop circle jerk where people who might not even have good content or interesting things to say have massively growing reach *because* they have massive reach.
Kind of like in fiat finance how the only companies that get loans are the ones that are already massive, therefore they are the most likely to simply keep up with inflation & make nominal gains, then the smaller, promising, truly innovative competitors get drowned under bigness for the sake of bigness.
Anyway that would be my counter argument. @jack might have been suggesting a completely different idea 😆
The Kardashian effect
They have the name because they were first to monopolize it, but they had to keep the fame. No small feat.
The counter argument is very fair. Though, doesn’t that self select out over time. If the people with 100k follows or 10 million put out crap content, they lose followers quickly. It take a LOT to build a large base.
Now, this could raise the question of “should there be people with 10mm followers,” or cult of personalities, but this just comes down to human nature. The vast majority want to be led and the platforms that will do the best are the ones that make it easiest for people to be led.
Curious about how #[4] would address this? I completely agree that follower count is a problem but it’s the only way good way to get your writing out there. This is a problem because it disadvantages people who post less frequently or who join the protocol later.
As a result we don’t see the best content, but the content with the most followers a lot of the time.
Same as zaps are for nostr
Changes the dynamic around tipping
Becomes a proxy for quality of content, which can be gamed with wash-zaps
I would love to hear more context on this. Like, what behaviors did you see (was it more of a problem of bots/spam or just fixation on "being popular").
How Twitter Gamifies Communication - C. Thi Nguyen
Follower count created a tool that could be weaponized — huge psyop in being manipulated by group think — humans innately want to move with and be a part of the crowd
And that's in a context where you can ACTUALLY count followers. You can't actually count followers for real in nostr.