I noticed it on Twitter first: I became increasingly bored by the content I was seeing. I also noticed the almost cultish appraisal of “thought leaders”. Sure, some of them are great minds and post interesting stuff. But overall I found much of it trivial. And some responses were outright arrogant.
I suspect much of what happens on social media is based on popularity and social group phenomena, rather than quality of content. And I have probably missed a lot of interesting ideas because I followed the “big names” instead of giving everybody a fair chance.
So I’m ready for an experiment. At the time of this writing, I have close to 3100 followers on dev.to. But I only follow around 50 people. Shame on me ;-)
In the next couple of days, I will follow everyone who follows me back - all the existing followers, and new followers. Let’s see how that goes.
What do you think about all of this?
Top comments (3)
Let us know how it goes. I predict (with some uncertainty) that the impact will be small to negligible.
Reason being, that research has clearly highlighted the ubiquity of the assymetry you observe. Meaning among other things, that most of the followers you have are probably pretty quiet by comparison and that you already follow explicitly or implicitly the most productive of them.
I'm not sure if course. Just a suspicion, And I'd love to hear how it goes.... following 😉.
I'm also reminded of the Friendship Paradox. A real study into this phenomenon.
My first experience with it was with AIDS studies in Africa. Where they found the effort to promote safe sex among the general population was mostly wasted and that the vast majority of transmission was down to a very very surprisingly so and worthy of reporting in research, minority of people.
And of course the modern internet world has a name for this phenomenon too: Influencers.
I saw your impact already, thanks