Great Article. Makes me once again happy, that I left Twitter a few months ago. Thanks!

how would Twitter change for you if you didn’t know how many followers you have?

In my case, it probably wouldn’t matter. I simply follow people who are clearly webdesigners/developpers, have a blog on which they post and such things. It’s usefull catching all their blogs and then saving them on Delicious.

Excellent post Josh, especially the part on people coming to social networks for the first time with nothing. It’s a very empty experience when that happens and something I noticed on my own social network, people would join but didn’t interact with the service. Why? Because they didn’t have anyone to interact with. Twitter had the same problem which is one of the reasons I think the they introduced the recommended followers option post signup.

nice article and I couldn’t agree more. I believe that it is not the number of followers that matters so much, but the number of conversations. More and more I feel like twitter (for me) is not a two way communication medium, but a one way. Because of the things I tweet (in hope for a respons) will be ignored or just not read. For me twitter is a way to start a conversation, not collecting followers. I’d rather have a few followers with a lot of conversations, than loads of followers who ignore you.

I have nothing of real merit to add. Just wanted to say “Good article”

Dude you’re making my brain hurt with all the ideas in this post. Couple thoughts. First, if the number of Twitter followers were not displayed, people would spend more time on connecting with other people in a quality manner, and the overall Twitter experience would improve. As opposed to collecting other people, which is somewhat perverse and is really about status like you say. Second, both connecting and collecting are powerful human impulses, and helping people do either of those things adds value. Good things to keep in mind if you want to start a microbusiness, which is something I’ve been pondering and trying to write about recently.

In the in-progress draft Chapter 8 our book (in progress) Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems, Bryce Glass and I talk about three classes of reputation display: corporate (hidden from all users), public (open to God, Google, and everyone), and personal (limited to the user or sometimes their chosen associates.)

While it may be true that Twitter followers really should be at least displayed as a personal reputation, it isn’t at all clear that it needs to be public. You’re right that it depends heavily on the behavior you’d like to encourage. Public encourages follower hoarding for the sake of personal status. Myself? I would be just as happy to have less followers – just the ones who actually are interested in what I have to say.

Also relevant to this conversation, we’ve recently completed a draft of chapter 6, which proposes a system for classifying incentives for user participation, at least as it pertains to creating reputation systems: altruistic (for the good of others), commercial (to generate revenue), and egocentric (for self gratification).

It’s all up and we welcome comments.

Randy Farmer

This is interesting, but I wonder how it splits across demographics.

For example, I run a community site for executives. In my product interviews, we always touch on recognition / attention, and without fail they all rate it poorly.

Either they aren’t interested in it, or they don’t want to admit that they are interested in it. I’m guessing it’s the latter and we’re still pushing forward with some lite recognition features.

I also agree with KingJohnny – I’ve found twitter to be less useful recently because I’m not able to start or engage in conversations anymore.

Excellent distillation about the motivations behind why social objects work as a motivator for user behavior. Good points for folks to remember when designing for participation. Getting at the core behavior – at the essence of what drives us will help a site or service be more successful.

I use user-style sheets in safari and firefox to simply hide this from my own view. I don’t want to see how many followers I have. I think people get overly paranoid that every time they tweet and they lose a follower they adjust their style to the audience. That’s not why I followed people, they were more interesting before they bowed to the whims of their followers. Especially when twitter is constantly doing spam clean-up. On a daily basis my follower count might swing 5-7 people each way. If I got worried it was something specific I said to drive people away or that got me more followers, people conflate correlation and causation. Hiding these numbers would help to alleviate this.

Quantity does not equate to quality. I think there should be some other system which could give a sense of quality rather than followers. The longer you are on twitter, or any social network, the more time you have to collect “hangers-on” which inflates your numbers. Similar to the delicious popular list, it is an echo chamber that is self-referential.

A better system for quality might be the number or replies from a diverse set of people, much like Google’s pagerank system.

Having a count encourages gaming the system as well as dumbing content down to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes I WANT niche content that is designed for a small group of people, i don’t want that person to change their style or compromise their tweets just to get a larger audience. People should be taught that if you have 10 happy followers is better than having 1000 that don’t care.

Great article and great facts to know about behavior that drive human experience.

fantastic

I also wonder, if people were to choose for one month whether they can only tweet (but not to read others) or only read other tweets (without tweeting themselves) what would they choose?

I’ve recently been helping to re-purpose a business Software-as-a-Service (Saas) system.

Newcomers now get a pre-populated system with:
5 shops
10 employees
3 products in 2 categories

Users love it – instead of getting a blank sheet they can pitch in and make the dummy set-up look like their real company.

The shops for example are
“Shop 1 (click here to change me)”
“Shop 2 (click here to change me)”

@Brian – good thoughts…do you have a link to the CSS hiding mehtod you use?

@Randy – The distinction you make between personal and public is right on. It’s possible to inform the person how many followers they have without making that information public.

And certainly there is a whole spectrum to this…you could make ranking public (like Top 10 Twitterers) without making the actual numbers public.

Here’s another question: is it in Twitter’s best interest to keep the numbers public? Does it drive use of the service?

Josh,

I like what you’ve done here but I have a different take on the behavioral accounting. Collecting things and collecting numbers and having numbers signify our status, being different things to me…

I tried to break it down here back at mine. Would love to continue:
http://bit.ly/4p3GLn

Showing the number of followers and followees does bring some value to the table. It can help establish the level of credibility a tweep has. If two are saying they can offer advice about Twitter, but one has 20,000 of each while another follows 2,000 but only has 100 following back, I know which one I’ll be listening to. The numbers can definitely become a distraction, but they also can still bring value.

This is yet another case where I think that Livejournal figured out so much more of the nuance of online social interaction than we appreciate.

On your User Info page on Livejournal, the list of who you’ve friended is always displayed. However, you choose if you wish to display the list of those who’ve friended you, or mutual friends. (see a screenshot of the options.)

When you were logged in, you could see the numbers yourself, but others couldn’t. It raises a bit of a different question of validation: is it more important to you that people follow you, or does it give you more credibility from others?

Which is the true motivator? Collecting, or displaying our collection?

This is my favorite line: “These behaviors aren’t going away anytime soon. So instead of decrying such behavior, we need to embrace it!”

Very true, and the five behaviors you list are spot-on. Maintain a moral compass against such things, sure. But recognize these are the basic human traits with which we come equipped. And design accordingly.

To hide the followers count, I just created a CSS file and added one simple line.

#home .stats { display: none; }

In my browser I add a User Style Sheet and point it to this new file.