No Follow

I was reading a piece in The Guardian by Seth Finkelstein the other week, in which he outlined the things which out him off of Twitter, principally the way in which it was all predicated upon promising some kind of micro-celebrity status to users, and the way in which it was inevitably dominated by a handful of high profile users. Whilst I broadly agreed with him on these points, it was his highlighting of the significance of the terms 'follower' and 'following' in the world of Twitter which really chimed with me. He's quite right that these terms (and the fact that each user's number of 'followers' and 'following' are publicly displayed), imply some kind of hierarchy. Worse, it introduces a highly competitive element, in which one's 'importance' is measured in 'followers' - to hell with the quality of content, just look at how many followers I have! Furthermore, the term 'follower' has something evangelical about it, making the most successful twitterers seem like cult leaders, striving to recruit acolytes to their nefarious causes. Surely it can only be a matter of time before twitter creates a 'Jim Jones' who, in his last post, commands his thousands of followers to drink poisoned Kool Aid.

But it isn't just Twitter which has become obsessed with 'followers' - it seems to be all the rage in blogs now, with blogger urging us all to install a widget which allows you to proudly display your blog's 'followers' for all to see! This trend really is threatening to turn the web into one big 'who's got the biggest dick' contest. I mean, really, why should I care who else is reading any given site I visit or, indeed, how many other people also read it? You might as well make you web stats public (some people do, I know). Personally, I've never seen the point. My web stats are of interest solely to me - they're there mainly to give some idea of the relative popularity of individual items and features on my site, what brings visitors to them and where they come from. All of which information, hopefully, I can use to tweak the site to improve it. Obsessing over traffic is very unhealthy - I know, I've done it. Ultimately, the reason you should be producing a personal site is that you enjoy it - how many visitors you get should be irrelevant. OK, if your site is a major source of income, then you should be concerned about traffic levels. However, for the majority of twitterers, bloggers and site owners, how many acolytes - sorry, followers - you have shouldn't even come into the equation.