Followers, Followings, And Begging
personal thoughts and rants
According to my profile on Twitter, I joined up in early 2008. It was basically the heyday of Twitter. It was fun with a long list of reasons to be there and I met a lot of neat people — many of whom are really good friends to this day. Some of those I have met IRL — or in real life as we say — and many more remain good online friends.
That said, I lost interest in Twitter when certain entities — businesses and people — started having competitions to see who could get the most followers. It had nothing to do with their content, and to me, it had more to do with egos. At about that same time, not surprisingly, there were lots of posts about buying followers and other things like that which annoyed me. I sort of drifted away and stopped using Twitter as much as I had.
In those early years, though, I had well over 10,000 followers and 10,000 people I was following. Many are still there although, like everyone, I lost people when Twitter did some cleaning up of dead, spam, and bot accounts — yet it’s still a lot of people.
Why am I saying this? Because when I first signed up for Medium [and I don’t even remember when that was] I signed up with my Twitter account so Medium brought over as my Medium followers and my followings all those people that I followed or was followed by on Twitter who also had Medium accounts. My brand new account on Medium started with over a thousand in each category. Do I know most of them? Nope! But I know a lot of them. Some are not even active on Medium, but like me, they had started accounts way back when. [And frankly, I am not inclined to go through the list to see who is who and whether or not I still want to follow them.]
It wasn’t until this year that I actually started to write articles on Medium. I followed people whose writings I liked, and was followed by people who had made a comment, or somehow indicated that they were reading what I wrote, or who I knew from other sites. I continue to follow writers here because they write what is interesting to me, and I don’t care whether they follow me back or not because that’s not my thing. It’s your writing I want to read — not be your best friend. [Although like with Twitter and FaceBook I assume some of you and I will become friends.]
But back to Twitter a bit. I mentioned Twitter because I still do go look and post there and where I got the germ for this article/rant.
There are many people there begging for followers. I see posts like “today is my birthday, can I get X number of followers” or “follow me so I get over one or two thousand followers” or some other “something” as a reason to beg for followers. And I can see that some people I’m following do follow and retweet the beg — because otherwise, these wouldn’t show up in my feed.
So there are yet/still/again people who are into the follower numbers game and I’m not sure if this just started up again on Twitter because I had not been there much — and I’m again less likely to hang out there because every time I go I’m faced with many begging for followers.
There’s always been a question in my mind with social media as to whether the number of followers means anything. I personally don’t think it does, but others think it’s good —it’s “social proof.” Me? I’d prefer to have fewer followers but ones who actually read what I write or post — on Twitter, Facebook, and here.
I’m not sure what those begging get out of people following them. And when it’s all they post about, I get it even less. But then I am me, and they are them.
It’s why I got tired of Twitter a long time ago and why I’m tired of it again — and I’m beginning to get tired of it now on Medium.
As I said I’ve only been active on Medium since earlier this year and at first, I got followed by people who seem to at least have read my articles, and the more I wrote the more followers I got. But of late I am seeing that the people who are following me are relatively new, which is fine, except a lot of them haven’t written anything yet so I have no idea whether I would want to follow them or not — I have no idea what they’re about.
Some of them don’t even have any words on their profile and some profiles are just blatant ads or they’re telling you in their profile to go someplace else to read what they write [and I assume sell.] Okay, that’s your thing but I won’t follow you back.
But back to what I started with — I’m seeing people who are begging for followers in their profile [and I am paraphrasing] “please follow me back — I need the money” — duh — following you does not make you money unless you think I’m going to follow you and read what you're writing or buy what you are selling.
I am one of those people who looks at profiles and content before I follow you — that was and is still true on Twitter — it has been and is true on Facebook — and it is certainly true on Medium.
If you have nothing to say in your profile that makes me want to follow you, I do not follow back. If you say “please follow me back” in your profile that actually makes me go: “nope.” I have also found suspicious people following me. Something about their profile or articles is “off,” so I check by hovering over their image, tapping my touchpad, and using “search Google for image.” Often I see that they have several Medium profiles with different names and the same photo, or profiles on other media with different names. These people I report and block. [I use this image search on other social media sites as well.]
I have long since learned that the world does not operate as I do, especially on social media, and it’s sort of sad because I think this begging begins to ruin platforms for a lot of people and I hope that doesn’t happen with Medium.
Maybe it all actually goes together somehow? Begging? Followers? Money?
Maybe I’ll figure it out — later — right now it’s time for more coffee.
