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Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1) Faking followers to create the impression
by aresant 11y ago
Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1)
Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive.
I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of undisclosed endorsements via podcasts / you tubers / etc
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
- droopybuns 11y agoI don't find a high follower count suggestive of anything. I think that your threshold for regulatory intervention needs to be much higher. Vanity metrics are not a threat to the marketplace.
- soared 11y agoSure, maybe consciously you aren't affected, but undoubtedly you see a difference between 0 followers and 10k followers (even if I bought all of them).
- firasd 11y agoAbsolutely. Once the govt takes an interest in keeping follower counts "accurate" it's going to meddle with all sorts of other metrics in your app too.
- loceng 11y agoI'm curious if you use ad blocking? Why or why not?
- sparkzilla 11y agoTwitter causes the problem by limiting the number of people you can follow. For example, people who want to grow their user base follow a lot of people so they can getting follows back. You might follow 500 people so you can get 50 of them to follow you. But once you follow 2,000 people you reach Twitter's limit and from there the number you can follow depends on how many people follow you. This is an incentive to buy fake followers, so you can continue to follow the people you actually want.