Follower Counts
Many years ago, during the dawn of blogging, the earliest major players had little Sitemeter icons on the sidebar of their page. You could click on it to see how much traffic they received and where it came from. On your own blog, you could see exactly where your traffic came from. As a result, ambitious smaller bloggers would cater to (or pick fights with) larger bloggers in the hopes of more traffic. Was this transparency a good thing? Hard to say. It was all tied up in vestiges of early-Internet norms, so any translation to today is fraught.
Now the big bloggers have gone institutional, the sitemeters are gone and the closest thing we have to early ‘00s blogging is Tumblr. It’s non-professional, wildly demographically unrepresentative of the real world and basically a free-for-all. The difference is that not only are follower counts private, it seems like a nearly-unbreakable taboo to discuss them. The only time I’ve ever seen an actual follower count mentioned is on an aesthetic blog. Once. Sometimes, I’ll read something along the lines of “I don’t care if I lose followers, but I’m gonna say it: TERFs are bad!” But no real numbers talk beyond bravebating.
As someone who is on Tumblr but not really of Tumblr, I’ve gotta ask: how did this taboo develop? Is it different in the corners of Tumblr I don’t visit? Are people worried about becoming doxx targets if they get too big? Does the fact that nearly everyone here is pseudonymous change things?
Or was the Sitemeter culture of early blogging just an artifact of a time when it seemed plausible to one day make a living off writing the sort of stuff they were writing about?
I don’t know how big a deal the Sitemeter ever was, but:
To the extent that there’s been an actual shift, I suspect it mostly has to do with the way that online presence has become intertwined with everyday life – and, therefore, with general social status – in a way that it definitely wasn’t in the early 00s.
Your follower count is not, at this moment, a fun cute thing. Not for many people, anyway. It’s a marker of your success as a human being. Talking about it is like talking about how much money you make; it basically has to result in the conversation developing a power dynamic, one way or the other.
…or that’s my theory, anyway. This is speculation based on the cultural norms of people who are not actually the people with whom I regularly spend time.