About a week ago I saw this post on Bluesky and thought, WTF? I had seen some of this person's other posts in my "Discover" feed and they were pretty rational, but this one just came off as really dumb. To me it says that anyone with fewer than 100 followers must be a troll and shouldn't be listened to.
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But even if the hundred doesn't refer to followers it's still a pretty arbitrary metric to judge anyone's statement. I guess you could say it's because I don't have a hundred followers that I'm sensitive about some line in the sand where people should listen to you or not. But still let's break down some reasons why this is a bad idea.
1. Not everyone on social media is trying to get tons and tons of followers. Not everyone is trying to be an "influencer" or get famous/rich or sell shit. On Twitter I had my author account with like 5000 followers or something. Did I ever talk to any of them? Not really--unless they overlapped with my personal account. Did they talk to me? Not really. Did I buy their shit? Probably not. did they buy my shit? Probably not. And since it was an "author account" I tried not to post anything about religion or politics or stuff like that. Mostly I just posted blog entries and sometimes book stuff.
The point being, having just a bunch of "followers" was like having a bunch of "friends" on Facebook you never interact with. It might make your number look good, but it doesn't really mean anything. It certainly doesn't mean that a comment you make should carry more weight.
Really starting on the 8th a bunch of X accounts from Indonesia came over to Bluesky and when I blocked some of them (before I learned of how to just filter posts with certain keywords) I noticed some of these accounts would already have 100 "followers" and all they did was post FOLLBACK! LET'S BE MOOTS! or some shit like that. But according to that post above, if one of those Indonesian accounts actually commented on something, it would count for more than my comment just because they have a bunch of fake "followers."
And let's not forget how many parents didn't vaccinate kids because some dumb D-list celebrity told them it caused autism.
2. For me this post was kinda saying the quiet part loud: POPULARITY IS WHAT MATTERS! The quality of your argument doesn't matter if you don't have a bunch of followers. That's just asinine, though probably true--see the paragraph above. Popularity shouldn't make something true or false and I suppose that's a big part of our problem these days that you can hear so many opinions that it can be hard to decide what's true or not--"AI" only adding another layer to that. But saying, "I only listen to the cool kids" is a pretty childish way to filter things.
3. It's pretty divisive to say stuff like this. One commenter took things a step farther by saying, "They should be restricted to each other until they crack that 100 count." To me this smacks of that old Seinfeld line: "They should have their own schools!" So people like me who haven't gotten to this magical "hundred" yet should be second-class citizens on the site? We should just sit down and shut up? That's really segregationist, man. Because again, getting back to previous points, having more popularity and "followers" doesn't make you wiser. If that were true, Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the geniuses they think they are.
Anyway, when you think about it, this is really one of the worst takes I've seen on the Internet. And seemingly for no reason either. This "advice" is utter bullshit, illogically creating a completely arbitrary metric to determine if someone's opinion is worthy or not. Which in the end is another good reason to always take bullshit on the Internet with a grain of salt--like this post!
From reading some other skeets in the dude's account I guess he was suffering from severe IBS pain, so maybe the pain and meds just fucked up his thinking process.
2 comments:
Good point Pat and that's a ridiculous metric to go by. Not that it matters but ratio and engagement is more meaningful. Some people have 100,000 followers but they're following 100,000 accounts. Some people have 100,000 followers but get less than 10 likes or rewteets. Anyway it's all pointless and arbitrary. In the end people are people and "metrics" mean nothing. Opinions are valuable even if they have less than 100 followers
Maybe they think a FB account with less than a 100 followers is fake or just made for someone wanting to be a troll. Like their second account where they can do whatever they want. But...I have 97 friends on FB, so I guess that makes me a troll. Most all of my friends are people I have known at one time or another. Most in person. When someone has tons of friends, there is just no way one can really know all of them. Also, most of them won't see your post no matter how many friends one has.
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