Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says Follower Count is Meaningless

In a fireside chat in New Delhi, India, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Monday the "follower count" metric on the social platform is meaningless. Talking in front of a live audience, the Twitter co-founder said it was probably unwise to include and emphasize on the follower count on his social network, a move he said the company did not realize while implementing it back in the day. "Back then, we were not really thinking about all the dynamics that could ensue afterwards," he said.

"One of the things we did was we had people follow each other -- so you can be a follower of someone," Dorsey said, explaining the thinking that went into carving some of the core features of Twitter. The company listed the number of people you had, and "made the font size a little bit bigger than everything else on the page. We did not really think much about it and moved on to the next problem to solve. What that has done is we put all the emphasis, not intending to, on that number of how many people follow me. So if that number is big and bold, what do people want to do with it? They want to make it go up."

"So when you open Twitter and you see that number is five. It is actually incentivizing you to increase that number. That may have been right 12 years ago, but I don't think it is right today. I don't think that's the number you should be focused on. I think what is more important is the number of meaningful conversations you're having on the platform. How many times do you receive a reply?"

Dorsey's remarks comes as he has publicly acknowledged that the company is rethinking about some of the core features of Twitter. late last month, a report claimed that Twitter was also thinking about discontinuing the "likes" feature -- Twitter neither confirmed nor denied it. On Monday, Dorsey reaffirmed that focusing on number of likes and retweets is not healthy.

Dorsey is not the only Twitter co-founder who has, of late, shown disdain for the follower count. Last week, Ev Williams expressed a similar sentiment. "I think showing follower counts was probably ultimately detrimental. It really put in your face that the game was popularity," he said at a conference.

Comments

Wait... what?!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what the hell have I been paying the click-farms for?!

Everyone knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Winning opinion wars is all social media is about nowadays, and having a higher number of echoing shitheads is what makes you win.

Re:Really?

[Zocalo]

Oh, that was absolutely the game alright, but you have to keep in mind who the "users" and "product" are when applied to Twitter, or any other social media platform. By making that number front and centre they basically incentivised their product to encourage more product to join the platform so Twitter would become a more appealling platform for their actual users, the advertisers. Now that their product is starting to lose faith in traditional social media platforms of course Twitter wants to make it all about the quality. And, to be clear, we're talking about the quality of how well they understand their product's interactions with other elements of the product and their shared likes for targetted advertising, not the quality of tweets. Frankly, I think this is a calculated move by Dorsey, aimed squarely at the marketing companies and Wall Street; "never mind the width; feel the quality... and *please* keep the money coming!"

Of course it doesn't matter

[bobstreo]

You need more numbers to indicate:

Bot Followers

Paid Followers

Creepy stalkers

Dorsey is just telegraphing he wants more control

[Crashmarik]

He obviously doesn't like the idea of users taking their numbers to advertisers and cutting a deal directly with them, instead of twitter grabbing every red cent that comes out of the platform. He also probably doesn't like the idea of having the fact he suspends the accounts of people with millions of followers continuously thrown in his face.

Expect this to be eliminated or subtly fudged, maybe a new number like "Validated Followers", something mostly useless for people to negotiate with.

Reputation Society

[mrwireless]

I think he's right. Increasingly our society is becoming a reputation society where the digitital mediation of behaviour and social interaction allows our social capital to be quantified.

A similar example would be the "snapstreaks" on Snapchat. This is basically quantifying how good friendships are, and it's causing a lot of stress in teenagers.

Digital technology allows social pressure to be designed on a hitherto unknown scale. The Stasi was a beta-test. China embraces this with its social credit system. We should not let our culture slide in the same direction.

Re:Reputation Society

[Kiuas]

Digital technology allows social pressure to be designed on a hitherto unknown scale. The Stasi was a beta-test. China embraces this with its social credit system. We should not let our culture slide in the same direction.

China is doing this with a clear intent to track its citizens and to silence any possible dissent. In the west the trends are molded by large corporations that are doing this for profit. The more addictive and socially pressuring you make the platforms, the more time on site user spend which then translates to more ad revenue. Also people who're slightly angry tend to be more engaged and hence pay more attention to ads, which is why the way 'filter bubbles' work is by mostly surrounding the user with content they agree with, but occasionally throwing in content they don't agree with, which is likely to provoke the user and make him react in some way (comment, like, dislike, share the post with a friend) which again, increases time on site and ad-revenue.

There's very little regulation of any of this. Western countries have long since recognized that advertising itself needs to be regulated so that people are not deceived by outright false claims and BS, but when it comes to the design of the platforms and their business models, it's a wild west environment. Thing to realize is that the platforms themselves are not going to magically change their behavior. They care about money, and money only. They will keep employing psychologists and other behavioral experts to design maximally addicting Pavlovian interfaces and filter-bubbles as long as it keeps making them more and more money. They do not inherently care whether or not anything people share on the platforms is actually true, what matters is how engaging it is. It's illegal for me or anyone in the west to take up an ad claiming that my new SnakeOil UltraPro homeopathic sugarwater pills will cure cancer at 20 € a month and extend lifespans by 30 years. However, if it so happens that some clueless blogger (that may or may not be connected to the company making the pills) running an 'alternative medicine' blog where they hype this remedy as the greatest thing ever decides to advertise his/her blog post on Facebook for people interested in homeopathy and natural remedies, Facebook will happily take their money and help them spread this disinformation, because the way laws work currently is that so long as what's being advertised is the blogpost (an opinion) and not the product itself, nothing illegal is happening. Convenient, don't ya think?

And in the meanwhile, while many rational people see this as problem, any attempt to solve this via regulations is always met with an uproar of 'look at Facebook/the government trying to censor information/free speech, this is turning into China!" The platforms don't want to interfere with content because they see that as damaging to their bottom-line (hell, the only reason Alex Jones was eventually banned is because of the threats he made and the legal departments of the companies probably decided that the amount of money he's bringing in is not worth the risk of a potential lawsuit), and the governments are unwilling or incapable of deciding what kind of regulation should be put in place to control the behavior of these platforms, because they're both clueless of the way tech works and afraid of the political downfall ('My opponent wants to decide what YOU see on Facebook, whereas I will never touch your social media feed!' etc) so the trends are just allowed to continue and amplify.

Whether we like it or not (and I don't) the fact of the matter is that social media platforms have become the primary channel of information delivery especially for young people and yet they remain massively more unregulated than any traditional media outlets. This is a problem, and one that the companies will not fix on their own because its currently massively beneficial for them. Comedy central did a very good skit about this where they equated

Remove it then

[dromgodis]

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Monday the "follower count" metric on the social platform is meaningless.

Well, he if anybody should be able to have it removed then.

Then we will see if it really is meaningless to others than himself.

Jack Dorsey: Clickbait and Trolling is the Future

[sonoronos]

Frightening. Jack just equated "meaningful conversation" with "what statements provoke the most responses". Welcome to the future of Twiiter, where clickbait and trolling is considered "meaningful" simply because they provoke the most responses.

Why stop there

[stealth_finger]

Why stop there? The whole of twitter is meaningless.