Hunter's rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that numb

Hunter's rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that number. I'm sorry, but as a "ground rule", this seems just wrong to me. There are many ways and many reasons to use e.g. Facebook as a communication service that have nothing to do with "being popular". Let me describe just one: I have a pseudonymous Facebook profile which gathers a number of people I have worked and played with before; some of them I know for more than 30 years already. Additions to this group happen, but are rare; these people are special to me, a status which is not for everybody. Each one in there is an important voice in my life, representing their values as they post their daily findings to my feed. Since I'm also all locked down against games and other apps, I have no problems with my signal-to-noise ratio being low.