Disable follower accounts or bucket them

[nolanlawson]

Based on discussion in this thread, I would like to either disable follower accounts or (more likely) shift to a bucket-based system.

Read the full thread for context, but I am tired of the hero worship, celebrity culture, and (yes) #branding that emerges from public follower counts. On the other hand, they're a good metric for distinguishing trolls (and newbies you want to welcome!) from established users.

My recommendation:

1. You can see your own follower count
2. Publicly, follower counters are displayed normally until you get to >100, at which point it just says "100+"

Thoughts? 🙂

[mlcdf]

I stumble on this thread a couple hours ago, and I had the same idea. So yeah, huge 👍

[nraboy]

I personally would like to see a follower count remain. Helps me determine a few things:

• Is this person legit or a knock-off account. With so many instances and people claiming to be Mark Zuckerberg, a clear indicator would be determinable by their follower count.
• Do others find this person to share valuable information. Few followers is generally a good indicator the person doesn't share anything worth following.

If you absolutely have to disable public followers, maybe you can consider doing like 1000+ rather than 100+?

[halkeye]

We have follower counts? I guess I always assumed we did. On Apr 12, 2017 10:38 AM, "Maxime Le Conte des Floris" < notifications@github.com> wrote: I stumble on this thread earlier, and I had the same idea. So yeah, huge 👍 — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#16 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAGuB_dSZrU9nR2ZddREODGpH3b7D1GDks5rvQwBgaJpZM4M7vPr> .

[dperrera]

I love this idea. Removing follower counts disincentivizes bad behavior and would quash some of our reflexive admiration of big numbers. Hopefully this move would focus people's attention on good content and thoughtful conversation. At the very least it would be an excellent experiment.

[newtoncalegari]

+1 for your suggestion.
As said in the thread, follower counts can eventually create a kind of unconscious bias, where we might judge people according to those numbers instead of paying attention to their actual content.
Agree with @dperrera, it would be a nice experiment

[colinhowells]

To nraboy's point: follower numbers would be the only user verification mechanism we had – if the instance's admin weren't acting as gatekeeper. Since Nolan's acting as such for the cafe, follower numbers could be dropped, for us. Other larger, more open instances might still need the number as people in them would need all the help they could get ...

[moke-codes]

I agree with the "unconscious bias" thing and the role that the followers' count plays in that matter.
My only question is, how can someone know that the person he found during a search is the person it's looking for and not someone else pretending to be that person?

[mlcdf]

@nraboy

Is this person legit or a knock-off account. With so many instances and people claiming to be Mark Zuckerberg, a clear indicator would be determinable by their follower count.

There are other ways to authenticate an account. So for me, this is a none issue.

Do others find this person to share valuable information. Few followers is generally a good indicator the person doesn't share anything worth following.

Well, "anything worth following" is pretty subjective.

In order to know if a person share anything worth following, the best way is by far to read what the person posts. To me, the follower count is just a "fame" indicator, not a "quality" indicator.

[blakeembrey]

@Moke-RS Isn't that an issue regardless of follower counts being visible? I could be wrong, but I thought you'd only see federated followers (if you're using search), in which case a legit user could easily have less followers than than a fake user from your perspective.

Either way, that's only accounting for other instances. On toot.cafe, as I understand it, it's mostly a curated community so it really wouldn't matter. The people on here should be real, and following the other discussions, fake users should be removed.

Edit: Other discussion mentioned is #9.

[nraboy]

@blakeembrey but my interests are not in strictly JavaScript. If I want to adventure out and follow someone who focuses on hardware, how can I be sure that they are real or not? Likewise if someone from another community wants to follow someone from a JavaScript community. Do we have to trust that JavaScript people stay in the JavaScript community and nowhere else? That seems not right.

[moke-codes]

@Moke-RS Isn't that an issue regardless of follower counts being visible?

@blakeembrey Yes, I think so. I'm not advocating for the follower's counts, just raising a concern. How could we tackle this problem? I don't know the answer for this. Also, I'm not sure if a "certified account" won't be necessary at any moment in the future.

[blakeembrey]

@nraboy Please check the first paragraph of my response. I'm not advocating either way, I'm just saying that using the count as a way to "prove" the user is real seems flawed. If you're viewing people on other communities, then you'd see their count on that community, and you can use that. If you're using the federated follower count from toot.cafe, seems pretty much irrelevant. I'd recommend using more real signals, and in both of these cases disabling it on toot.cafe seems like a win rather than being bad (what one community does wouldn't affect anyone else, nor does it affect you to find those people you'd like to follow in other communities).

[halkeye]

Just for the record this would only affect the profiles of toot.cafe users. I'm pretty sure the profile of anyone else goes to the server they are on. If we do have a local copy, the followers and stuff is wrong anyways.