Over the past few days, actor Ashton Kutcher has been racing CNN to be the first Twitter user with a million followers. Kutcher and other parties like EA have been pulling out all the stops to help his account gain followers as quickly as possible to hit the number. Clearly, this is a game — and really, gaining followers on Twitter, for most people, is a game. Which raises the question: Should Twitter just remove the follower counts?
Engadget cofounder Peter Rojas thinks it may be time for just that. “I’m beginning to think that Twitter would be a better place if it didn’t list anyone’s follower count,” he tweeted out today. That may indeed be true. It’s not just the Kutcher/CNN race, there have been a lot of users getting annoyed with the service — or other users — because of things like Twitter’s recommended user list (which currently includes the TechCrunch account). Some people are pissed off that only accounts of notable users seem to be included on it, adding tens of thousands of followers to their already high follower counts.
Why does anyone care? Well, in some cases it’s ego. The more followers you have, the more “popular” you are. And the more likely it is that other users will retweet what you have to say. In other cases it has to do with web site traffic. Accounts like TechCrunch’s tweet out links to their stories, which followers then click on — depending on how many followers you have, this can drive a lot of traffic to your site. And in some cases, it’s just a game. A lot of people on the web are bored; attempting to do things to raise you Twitter follower numbers is a way to pass the time.
Twitter, at its core, is supposed to be about communication, not your follower count. A couple of years ago when the number of Twitter users only registered in the thousands, a user would tweet something out and maybe only a dozen other people would see it. Was Twitter any less “fun” than because of that? No. But now, it seems like there’s a mentality that if you only have a few dozen people following you on Twitter, what’s the point of saying anything? Numerous people have given that as an excuse as to why they don’t tweet very often.
So what if you couldn’t see how many followers other people had? It would certainly take a lot of the pressure off users to gain more followers. And that could be a good thing. Perhaps the greatest thing about Twitter is that it can be what you make of it. Some people use it to tweet out where they are, others use it to tweet out funny things that pop into their heads, others use it to share article they’re reading, others use it to find information. With the drive to increase follower counts, there’s certainly a concern that it’s becoming less about the core communication, and more about self-promotion and straight-up bullshit just tweeted out hoping that others will see it and start following you.
But at the same time, not having a follower count, could actually make people use Twitter less. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing for many users, it means less overall activity on Twitter — and that is a bad thing for Twitter. If there’s no game to play, a lot of people would have no choice but to stop playing it. That could lead to a decrease in quantity — but perhaps an increase in quality.
With Twitter’s growth now absolutely exploding, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about quality over quantity. I really don’t want to see Twitter overrun by people pimping their own brands to gain more followers. I don’t want to see Twitter Search — its most valuable asset in the long-term — saturated with retweets from celebrities because millions of users are following them.
At least Kutcher has the right idea behind why having a million followers on Twitter is interesting. In the video below he talks about the insane idea that one person using this medium can have a larger audience than a traditional mass media powerhouse (CNN). (Entrepreneur Andrew Keen has more interesting thoughts on this that he recently shared with us.) Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to see any “regular” person ever reach such status on Twitter. Kutcher can do it because he’s a movie star — so it really shouldn’t be a shock that he can get a million people to follow him. So why should we care how many people follow him? Or for how many people follow anyone else for that matter? We really shouldn’t.
if they did they would lose the majority of the celebs that bring in more users. celebs like seeing that they are popular
“A couple of years ago when the number of Twitter users only registered in the thousands, a user would tweet something out and maybe only a dozen other people would see it. Was Twitter any less “fun” than because of that? No.”
Um, how about yes?
Twitter becomes more and more interesting to the end-user from as a communication tool when other users actually…communicate with you.
That’s actually why I went with ‘fun’ instead of ‘useful’ — I agree that more interaction is obviously better. All I’m saying is that Twitter, at its core, is an interesting platform no matter the scale.
I guess I still disagree with you. I mean, how fun is it to communicate with yourself on Twitter? It isn’t. You need SOME sort of scale. I understand one could argue if you have 1 million following you its a sensory overload situation.
Then people will turn to this kind of service http://www.twittercounter.com to find out the followers of other people. And if that can be embeded on their Twitter page then…that means another third party service will take off (Twittercounter).
no they shouldn’t get rid of the follower count because it would reveal how empty and devoid twitter is. Without the race to staggering number of followers, twitter would be just posts about “I’m eating a grape now”
But Twitter as a company needs popularity to turn it into a business in some way. This Ashton Kutcher thing may get them some advertising ideas, etc.
The flip side to that is that it may bubble out and when the amount of tweets drops say 25% from a ridiculous peak, the media will start saying that Twitter is doomed and its users will feel less motivated to post.
A couple years ago, if you had a few hundred followers, maybe 10-20 saw a message. Today, with a few thousand followers, maybe 5 people see that message. “Scale” means fewer people see your messages, not more.
It’s easy to see why they are racing to 1 million, but it doesn’t mean to much from my humble perspective.
For myself and many Twitter users it’s about the conversation and following. It’s an active process and even if it’s not monetarily profitable it is in other ways.
Twitter should limit the numbers to an agreed upon percentage of socialization balance between links, RT’s, Replies, with DM’s not included in the equation to keep twitter serving everyone and everyone striving to interact with people of shared interests.
Hopefully I’m not to far off topic and you wrote a great post it’s appreciated it and it’ll get RT’d
Display until 25k and then show 25k+ or a little gold star or something.
Or perhaps another arbitrary number.
If they remove it, what would losers like Matt Cutts do?
Listing the followers can give power to the people.
For example: My friend had a customer service issue she was unable to resolve over the phone. Fed up she spoke about it on twitter. Suddenly the company was following her and minutes later sent her a direct message with instructions on who to contact.
Her issue was resolved. The company realizes how quickly word can spread.
Thanks Twitter.
Why do you need to know the # of followers for that to happen?
I,d try http://www.clasilistados.org
AWESoME!!
Xoxo
Leave it.
No easier/better way to see who I want to avoid and who’s worth considering for a follow. Any competent social media user won’t care about their follower/friend count. There will always be morons who go down the list and try and friend/follow everyone they possibly can.
Let them. I’ve got a circular file cabinet in the corner waiting for their info.
I agree. I use people’s follower counts to see if I should follow them. It is a useful tool to see if their tweets are interesting enough to sustain a large following. Also as Mr. Tweet points out, the ratio of followers to following is important.
I tend to look at the number of followers and updates a user has to base my decision on whether they get to follow me or not. (I’m not above blocking the hell out of follow requests if it keeps my life simple and Twitter enjoyable.) I follow only those whose feed I would enjoy reading all day, every day, regardless of how popular they are or are not. If you’re interesting, I’ll dig your feed and follow it and you. If not, you’ll be outta luck.
See now being social works? Twitter isn’t just about getting your twits out there for business, it’s also about building online strangerships (friendships with strangers online seems too bold of a label). Some of us are interested in quality, not quantity. Much like small talk at cocktail parties, twits should be fun, interesting, considerate, informative and stimulating.
I can think of possibly a handful of businesses on or offline I actually care about or would be interested enough in to be brand loyal to. I don’t care about businesses online. I care about people. Most of the people I’ve met through my various blogs and social media sites are only interested in real people, too. Celebs are like businesses to me. They are online to promote themselves as a brand, to control their image and to have some fun doing it.
Some celebs are actually of benefit to following like Martha Stewart who is informative and knowledgeable while others are just downright funny and devilish like John Lithgow, Kevin Smith, Christopher Walken, etc. Each brings something to the table, to their feed, to their followers, thankfully. And they make logging into Twitter fun, not a chore or harrowing, unlike Kutcher who proves once again what a 12-year-old douchebag he is at heart. Why anyone would follow him or the likes of Lindsay Lohan or others of their ilk, I will never know. I mean, really, would any of you want to have them in your lives and claim them as friends? Not me.
Which brings me back to my point about what Twitter is for me, a social site that brings people I would chose to have in my offline life together with me online.
most insightful comment here:) thank you for sharing. your experience has been similar to mine. I un-followed people who posted inane nonsense, regardless of their celebrity-status. I’m not following all my friends. I only follow the ones who have proven themselves to not abuse twitter.
In any case, I agree with your assessment that most people simply don’t add any value. The web is special in that it gives everyone a voice – and that is empowering. Unfortunately, as you and I noticed: most people just don’t have anything valuable to add, whether that value is entertainment (funny/interesting), insight(need intelligence for this one), or knowledge (need to actually be knowledgeable).
Yeah. Long, but some good points.
“Long, but some good points.”
Over 140 characters?
we will win the twitter race to 1 mill in 20 hours and 7 minutes. ashton will get to 1 mill in 3 days.
Much quicker than that!
This is just a smart marketing stunt to promote blahgirls.
the twitter follower count is the whole marketing engine… seeing people with a lot of followers probably makes those who don’t use twitter feel like their missing out and join because of it. (even though they don’t understand what the hell it is)
how many of ashtons new followers are new signups this week?
re: new signups. that would be VERY interesting to find out.
I did a screencast looking at this about two weeks ago… Most of them were new signups, or at least the first 50 pages I looked at. http://vimeo.com/3933551
It turned to a game when the media (including TC) reports it and makes such a big deal about it.
Sup dawg, Twitter should remove Twitter, so we can sleep while we sleep.
Agreed
well the whole twitter is a game ain’t it? am i the only one who sees it this way?
Depends, some people game it no differently then how myspace was originally gamed. However there are people that use it for legitimate reasons, I don’t know these people.. but I have heard of them.
YES. at least the option for some of us to hide it. i’d actually pay for that.
instant business model!
paying to remove features is the next trend!
Phone companies charge for unlisted numbers… what the hell?
Anyhow, this is about credibility.
Follower counts originally allowed for a quick credibility check of the tweets someone was sending (more followers = more trustworthy tweets, so follow them). This is an extension of the winner-take-all effect mass media governs more generally.
But the point where that utility was reliable has been surpassed because of stunts like Kutcher’s (and Oprah) and overall gaming of the system. Perhaps **because** one can no longer rely on user count as a metric of credibility, it could become chic to hide follower count as a paid feature.
Twitter would become a far more Zen-like exercise in participatory conversation as a result… and I suspect we’d stop hearing about “how to get more followers on Twitter” which seems to be the hottest topic Twitter offers the salon today.
I agree. It should be optional.
I think they should remove it…Just about everyday I get requests from people who have learned how to inflate their follower numbers.
It gives a false impression.
This game is ridiculous. Twitter is a medium where you follow people that you care about, not for the sake of following and winning the grand prize for being the millionth follower. I follow people in Twitter only to learn updates and interesting articles they share. Now, am shifting my listening focus to http://www.boilingpage.com that brings the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter. Yes, that’s exactly what I want. Who cares what you did yesterday, I care about what articles you share and Boilingpage ( http://www.boilingpage.com ) does that for me.
MG – can you explain how this would work in practice?
If you would still be able to get a list of someone’s followers, it’s a short API call away from being able to calculate the number, so you can’t really get rid of follower counts unless you also get rid of an important feature on which lots of Twitter apps rely.
Yeah sure, there would still be plenty of ways to find out the number — just as there is still an unofficial top digg users list — but if it were off the main profile pages, a lot of people would have no clue how to find it and so it wouldn’t matter to them nearly as much.
Follower counts mean different things to different people. I have quite a few friends that think its badass that they have 15 followers. That means 15 people who may pay attention to what they say. Maybe it makes them feel important, who knows. But Facebook shows friend count, MySpace does too. Numbers drive people unfortunately. For me? I like having a place that I can share thoughts and ideas with cool people. 10 of them, or 10,000.
Agreed Drew, but Facebook is more about connections with people you actually know (for all but the most popular people, at least), Twitter has never really been about that. Good thoughts.
This is true about Facebook. At the end of the day, I think Twitter will be the next Blogger, so having full control over what you display, what people see, how people see it, etc. will be their business model. I would like to *own* my Twitter account.
get a blog then ?
I’m just saying Twitter is dope because it’s new and a little different, so why change it to something we already have ?
Ban the follow count !
To follow me on Twitter its http://www.twit...r.com/richwhite – LOL
Famous people on twitter make me want to stab myself in the face with a sharp object.
These twats have a heck of a lot less to say then that farting twittering chair.
I think that they should do what LinkedIn does at a certain point. On LinkedIn, anything over 500 contacts lists it as “500+” That way you realize there is a big network but it doesn’t incent a sheer numbers approach.
For Twitter 500 may be too small. But what if it was 10,000+
Someone else just raised the same idea to me. An interesting thought no doubt.
Link bait.
So where’s my link?
PS — Ashton is not allowing people to “unfollow” him. I don’t know how, but it’s true.
What do you mean? I see the option to unfollow him..
I unfollowed him a few weeks ago, he got too annoying.
I was able to unfollow him. If you unfollowed him and still receiving updates it’s probably just a cacheing issue. I’ve had it happen to me many times… even to users I’ve never followed before,
I unfollowed Guy kawaski 10 minutes after following him but it took about a day before his spam stopped coming in.
Easy reason why – there are a number of spam followers that I’ve gotten in the past few weeks and spotting their following/follower ratio is an easy way to see if they are a spam account; if they follow a zillion people and no one follows them back, then they are spam.
The follower count is a decent measure of ‘authority’ or a term I like to use ‘legitness’. If someone follows me or I stumble upon a page, I really only have a few barometers of whether or not this person is legit or not: their follower count (primarily), their website to go check out, the effort they’ve put into their bio/background/css crapola, and I suppose actually browsing the people who follow them.
One nice metric instead of absolute follower count would be the set intersection of people we both follow (aka facebook-style).
Re: Intersection thought. Great idea Henry.
And I almost went into the whole Loic/Twitter Search by authority idea, but didn’t want to weigh the piece down.
Don’t forget the quality of their tweets.
What about a ‘weight’ alongside the count that shows your distribution, ie how many people follow the people that follow you? Someone with 10,000 followers of no importance vs someone with 1,000 followers.. ie Celebrities probably have tons of followers who only have maybe a few followers each, yet someone in the design community or something may have more people following them that also have a significant amount of followers. Or maybe a circle of 100 or 200 people in an industrty all following each other but some following a few more than others so you can see who’s really running the show or something.
I’d like to use my small amount of authority to suggest killing the follower count. It’s breeding a community of hoarders.
Yes. The popularity contest spam is getting tiresome.
I couldn’t care less about follower numbers because there are so many artificial follower-increasing schemes rampant now that someone’s follower count is no indication whatsoever of their capacity to entertain, amuse, inform or befriend.
On the other hand, people for who it is an issue don’t bother me at all – one of the great things about Twitter is that there is something, and someone, for everyone – live and let live, I say, provided that nobody could be hurt by the things people do.
No. The follower count is a crucial tool for businesses trying to connect. Just one additional way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
TWITTER NEWS = ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Well Said Jason. Its beginning to appear that MG was only acquired to be the twitter correspondent on TC.
Appearances are deceiving. It’s only been a few days — give me a bit more time than that.
Kutcher is doing it to raise awareness for No More Malaria – or, did that little item slip your notice – it’s not about his ego, but ending Malaria with something as simple as a bed net. 1 million followers = 10, 000 malaria preventing bed nets.
That become his stated goal AFTER the race started. First, he was just going to ding dong ditch Ted Turner’s door. Did that little item slip your notice?
Yes, malaria thing is great, we’ve covered that at least 3 other times in the past few days.
No point in overanalyzing it. Were you born perfect? Who cares what he did or didn’t do the point is he is doing it now: Don’t get stuck in the past.
No way. Just because the “high profile” accounts are playing a game is not a good reason to make a change to something that impacts pretty much every user on the system, in a number of different ways.
It’s incredibly useful in a smallish industry or interest area to be able to figure out “who is influential here? Who are people listening to?”
That ability relies heavily on the ability to see how many followers somebody has.
Let CNN etc. play their games. What’s the harm? The real strength of Twitter is in the more local areas anyway. It’s about the people reporting stuff that then gets picked up by CNN, not about whatever CNN is doing.
Who listens to them, anyway? Last I heard they couldn’t even hit 1,000,000 listeners
Sure, get rid of the count. But I want to see who is following who as a way to connect with more folks I’m interested in. If thats still their at the end of the day I’m happy. I avoid most mainstream tweets anyways. This is mostly a non-issue for me.
I don’t think Twitter should remove its follower counter.
However, suddenly it turns out that all the big celebs in Twitter are racing for the million and what started as a natural growth looks pretty artificial right now.
That’s a shame.
meant to say racing not reaching.
A very interesting and timely argument, MG. It’s a bit like LinkedIn when they capped one’s contacts at 500. It didn’t matter if you had 2000 no one would know. I do think that if Twitter eliminated the number of followers this would improve the overall quality of information being shared and would eliminate all of the gamers popping up out of the woodwork selling their Grow-Your-Twitter-Followers software overnight. Great debate. Now, what will Twitter do?
I normally look at the follower count to see if the twitter account is legit or if it’s just someone who is trying to solicit business. I say keep the count, otherwise how could you find cool new people to follow quickly?
I decide who to follow by what they SAY. Not by how many followers they already have.
Maybe the follower count is a game of sorts and my competitive personality loves the challenge of building those followers. I am using for business and want to invest my time finding people to follow who care about my business in the hope they will follow me. I’m never going to get to 5,000 let alone a million, and I am particular, but seeing my follower count increase spurs me on to put the extra time into Twitter since all my social media time is ON TOP of an otherwise demanding job. I’d hate to lose that little push.
@Carmen Hughes — good point. A cap might make sense. But for Twitter, it should be way way higher than 500. 500 is a good number for LinkedIn, but the way people use Twitter I think the number should be (off the top of my head) more like 10,000.
There’s little use to the average user in distinguishing among anything over that threshold; but the difference between a 1,000 follower individual (who could just be a motivated teenager who’s done a lot of self-promotion) and a 9,000 follower individual (who is more likely saying something that has genuine resonance — as an end user, it’s worth being able to see that difference and make your own judgment.
hey Pete, great point! 500 on Twitter is indeed too small of a cap. Someone tossed out the 10,000 figure which sounds pretty good. Of course this is all speculation as to whether this idea will go anywhere.
I’d rather not see a cap. I don’t like the gaming, but I (or you) shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to read someone who is popular because s/he is actually interesting.
What Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are doing is great! More of us should follow their lead and donate whatever we can to this worthwhile cause. I’m supporting them 100% and doing what I can to get all my followers involved, too.
Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Kutcher! You’re both terrific. Your Tweeps love you!
No, they should not get rid of the follower numbers. It doesn’t hurt anybody! No one on Twitter has to follow anyone else if they don’t want to, and they can block someone if they don’t want to be bothered by them.
While I like the idea of hiding numbers of followers, I’d still like to see a follower-followee ratio. I’m always wary of following those who have significantly more followees than followers.
Yes, let us ban all metrics that disturb us or make us feel bad. In fact, I think we should get rid of votes, money, speedometers, and blood pressure readings.
Here here.
Just wanted to say it’s nice to see you commenting a lot on this thread – don’t see that enough w/TechCrunch writers.
The Twitter count is a good indication of who may actually be listening to you and how following a user can help meet your goal for being there. It provides an indication of whether you are likely to be able to build a relationship, or whether the follow should be seen as a source of information, laughs, or other 1-way communication.
Twitter’s establishment of arbitrary barriers (such as 2000 followers) is also frustrating to users and should be part of the whole follower count discussion.
If Twitter does decide to do away with the “count” I hope that a user’s follower profiles will still be accessible – it’s a great way to discover other interesting Tweeps!
barrier = 2000 following (mistyped-sorry!)
How is displaying a follower count any different than advertising how many rss readers you have?
This wasn’t an issue until twitter started promoting suggested users which are pretty heavily weighted towards mainstream celebs instead of the digerati.
Followers are nothing more than glorified Myspace Friends. It would be nice to have it to be removed but it’s one of the few novelties Twitter has going for it.
It Really Isn’t That Serious In My Opinion. How Many Followers I Have On Twitter Doesn’t Define Who I Am And Who Likes Me. Ashton Is A Celebrity So Of Course More People Are Gonna Follow Him Rather Then A College Student In NYC Lol. My Little 50 Something Followers Makes Me Feel Good Cuz They Clicked Follow Not Against There Own Will But Becuz They Wanted To. To Be Perfectly Honest I Only Talk To A Couple Of People On Twitter Lol. I’m Only On There Becuz Of Day26 And Other Celebs Along With My New Twitter Crew. Itz Not A Big Deal To Me To Remove It….If They Do Then Hey My World Till Goes Round. I’ll Live LOL.
Plus Having All Those Followers Makes It Hard To Reply To People Lol.
Wow, that was hard to read.
Typing Entire Paragraphs In Proper Case Is Awkward, Not To Mention Against The Internet Commenting Style Guide.
I think it should be optional on Twitter.
Many people on Twitter do not have “meaningful” followers, defined as people with whom you have a real mutually trusting relations built up during a period of actual interactions.
A new site, TweetBrain, http://tweetbrain.com/ seems to overcome this shortcoming pretty well. It enables Twitter users to interact with each other via Q&A exchanges. Others can chip in and vote about As too.
See also, e.g.
https://tweetbr...sers/by/answers
https://tweetbr....com/bendtheweb
I really couldn’t care less how many followers Ashton Kutcher has—he is completely off my radar.
This is the great thing about Twitter. You follow those that are relevant to you, and the fact that certain celebrities may have a million followers has no influence on my experience whatsoever.
However, I find that I use the following/follower ratio to help establish whether someone is worth following or not.
I don’t understand, let’s just have fun and don’t take the fun out of it… =o)
I think it should be optional on Twitter. So that people who prefer to keep such info private have an option.
Furthermore, many people on Twitter do not have “meaningful” followers, defined as people with whom you have a real mutually trusting relations built up during a period of actual interactions.
A new Twitter based service, TweetBrain, seems to overcome this shortcoming pretty well. It enables Twitter users to interact with each other via Q&A exchanges. Others can chip in and vote about As too.
The many to many media model is in it’s infancy. We will look back at this race as a seminal moment. How we use Twitter et al, is evolving as we “speak”. If you seek relevance, focus your followers and optimize for your niche. Do you really think 1 million followers are interested in Malaria nets or the thrill of getting Ashton’s attention? Either way the people are “speaking”. I say let it be…
People are having fun with link counts because they’re fun. Twitter shouldn’t take the “Oh crap people are having fun with link counts, pull the plug!” stance.
Thanks MG, I’m liking your posts more and more. Love your additions to TC.
I like the LinkedIn method. Instead of simply listing actual followers you should have a cap, and from then on be a #####+. That way people see that they have many people following them so you get that recognition, but people that keep trying and trying to gain more followers outside of just having good content annoy the hell out of me.
Me and my ~70 followers will return to our small whole in the intertubes…
sorry, interweb…wide wide world of web…you meddling kids!
The follower count is important because it allows potential followers to quickly assess if the user has credential and awesome hype*. Not only is follower count great as a one-step guide in consideration, it is inspiration in one of it’s million forms and who doesn’t want that?
* hype in this sense is used as a positive term
The follower count is important because it allows potential followers to quickly assess if the user has credential and awesome hype*. Not only is follower count great as a one-step guide in consideration, it is inspiration in one of it’s million forms and who doesn’t want that?
* hype in this sense is used as a positive term
I did my own version of “Should Twitter Remove Its Follower Count?”, in 12 minutes, got 6 answers from Twitter users at
https://tweetbr...nswers/to/34912