Why does follower count even matter anyway? Seems pointless unless you’re trying to flex so you can be an influencer of sorts.
Discussion
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. 🤷🏻♂️
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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?