Should Twitter remove its follower count?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/16/should-twitter-remove-its-follower-count/?awesm=tcrn.ch_DW&utm_medium=awesm-twitter&utm_content=techcrunch-autopost&utm_campaign=techcrunch&utm_source=direct-awesm

by andr • 17 years ago

22 18 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

vaksel• 17 years ago

i doubt they'll do it, competition helps them grow

smileplease• 17 years ago

yes, they should get rid of it.

vladocar• 17 years ago

YES!!!

ajdecon• 17 years ago

Would it really remove any pressure to increase follower count? Presumably you could still see your follower count and who is following, and if you're trying to drive traffic or affect a conversation than you're still going to be trying to push it up. If you're feeling silly-competitive about follower count it might kill that irrational pressure, but I really doubt that's a major motivation for that.

The only maybe-positive effect I could see is that it might force readers to evaluate twitters based on content rather than joining a crowd of followers... but for organizations' twitters, that follower-count is often a good first-look evaluation as to how interesting it really is. Watching count also provides useful information about the rate of change of a person or organization's popularity.

far33d2• 17 years ago

NO!

Follower count is the only way to recognize spam/junk accounts. If someone follows 10k people and has 4 followers... obvious spam account.

dschobel• 17 years ago

Twitter could still use such obvious discrepencies (and does, I believe) to nuke spam accounts without the numbers being publicly visible.

mr_justin• 17 years ago

But it's the non-obvious discrepancies that I'm more concerned with. I have no qualms about blocking people when their following/follower ratio is off-kilter.

sjs382• 17 years ago

It is? How about you follow people you know or people who say interesting things. Or does that just make too much sense? ;)

far33d2• 17 years ago

It's more a question of who I block. Sometimes I have IRL friends who sign up for twitter and have no tweets yet. If I see that they also have 10000 people they are following, I don't waste time figuring out if I know them.

chacha102• 17 years ago

You could just look at their last 5 posts. Even if it is a bot that only shoots out links, if you are interested in those links, it shouldn't matter what their numbers are.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

Every spam account I've seen has had several hundred followers.

Mostly other spambots, I'm sure, or other karma/attention-whores, but the point is that follower ratio isn't a very good metric.

roc• 17 years ago

While a potent driver of early growth, it's just going to become a hassle and a distraction from actual use. (not unlike public friends lists on social networking sites)

cjc• 17 years ago

Of course they should NOT remove it! Like facebook, myspace, and real life, follower counts provide a huge service.

The number of followers is a really strong objective measure of an account's (or a person's) legitimacy.

How do you know the guy that added you on facebook isn't a spam bot? If he has 600 friends (or whatever is average in your social group), then he's probably legit. If he has 0 friends, he's probably not.

How do you know if the guy that's presenting you a business proposal is trustworthy? Based on the number of references or mutual friends or the breadth of his past experience (higher = better).

How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

My point is that external opinions of people (or representations of people) are really important. The easiest way to verify this is to look at sheer numbers - "Tom has 20,000 followers. Mike has 1,000 followers. Therefore, I am risking less by following Tom" is sound logic. People don't have time to research every Twitter account they want to follow. Therefore, Follower Count is a really great way to convey legitimacy quickly.

tdm911• 17 years ago

How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

Whilst I agree with you, it should be noted most people thought the CNNbrk account was CNN until yesterday (and only now it actually is). That's 900,000+ people who had verified it.

wallflower• 17 years ago

I like how LinkedIn displays 500+ if you have gobs of network connections, and I doubt Twitter will do something like that.

bbuffone• 17 years ago

I am calling for all people to stop following both @cnn and @aplusk.

topynate• 17 years ago

Anyone who doesn't like the supposed pressure that exists to accrue more followers can use a Greasemonkey script to strip that data from their page views. I see no reason for them to enforce that preference on anyone else.

datums• 17 years ago

I would love to see how this changes the usage of twitter. Maybe for the better.

Should Twitter remove its follower count?

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