deleting my toots about follower counts being bad. people have made good points about them being necessary and i feel pretty shitty for being so flippant about it. i'm sorry
@aemarc aw thanks, i do feel like my privilege left me with a blindspot and people calling me out were dealing with problems i never had to face or think about. its all good. i wont stop tooting
@live I don't agree. Don't delete it. I'm surprised. I've only heard people talking about how good it would be to not have follower counts. People are saying it's too much tied to self-worth..
@dragonluvr89 right but some more marginalized people who have dealt with harassment highlighted how important it is to have transparency about how far your posts can reach. more followers = greater exposure = greater risk of harassment, so people who want to keep their circle small need to have a way to make sure they're doing that.
@live @dragonluvr89 Right but wouldn't this be an argument for *private* follower counts, but not public ones? I.e. you know how many followers you have, but no one else does.
@nolan @dragonluvr89 that is a good point but people also mentioned that they would like to know whether the person has a bunch of followers before they reply to their posts, for example. concerns about it being a distracting number that could breed hierarchy aren't important enough to outweigh that
@live @dragonluvr89 Hmm because they're worried about getting publicly shamed by someone who has a huge audience? In that case though, wouldn't you just block that person? Maybe I'm missing something. 😕
BTW my idea is more of a bucketing or limit system: once you get to 100 or so, you just see 100+. Also of course it would only apply to accounts on that instance.
@live Doh! I guess I missed all the drama.
@mjjohnson meh it wasn't really drama, nobody @ me or anything, but i saw their posts and they had a point so i deleted
@live what are the positive points
@live the thing is, it's discourse for a reason. it's a necessary back and forth to discuss a topic. just because you didn't consider all sides of something doesn't mean you're wrong, and it's doesn't mean they're right either just cuz they wanna rebut
@nance yeah, i've spent enough time in leftist online circles to see some pretty absurd callouts, but this wasn't one of those
@live it's fine! don't worry, everyone's entitled to their own opinion and their own opinion can change, too
Maybe follower counts for the user make sense, but hiding follower counts on profiles (or some other element) would still make sense?
I haven't caught the entire discussion, obviously, but it seemed like a concept that might have some meritous element somewhere in it.
(And, of course, it's entirely possible I'm wrong. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.)
What points did they make?
@TheNicktator read the replies
@live don't feel shitty u had some p funny tweets