"I wonder what the world would be like if certain people never discovered their twitter follower count."

What would happen if follower counts went away? Would it have huge catastrophic impact on how people use apps, or would it encourage a more positive outlook on the place of social networks and digital tools?

I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Removing those counts would likely damage the social dynamic that makes networks like Twitter effective/fun/addictive.
Without an audience, it's difficult to know what to say or share and how to phrase and present it.

Twitter users cultivate a cohort of followers based on the content they create and the people they engage. If there was no way of evaluating your effectiveness as a tweeter or knowing your interested audience, the point of a public network like Twitter would be severely diminished.

That's not to say however, that this kind of conversational engagement and satisfaction, couldn't be cultivated in a way that reduces the presence of ego and swagger online. I don't think we've seen this kind of abstraction applied yet online.

I don't have the capacity to give a long answer at this hour. But to be perfectly honest, and slightly pessimistic, I'd be genuinely curious what other metric users would use to judge others on twitter. For instance, I am guilty of judging people who follow me or jump in on a conversation I'm in based on twitter count. Could the next metric be how clever their bio is? Or how many people they are in fact following? Following counts could reach an all time low to portray the illusion of exclusivity.

twitter follower count*

Amritha — I think everyone judges people based on follower counts, and in many cases, following:follower ratios.

Ev Williams mentioned this in the recent Branch roundtable with Jonah Peretti (buzzfeed.com)

"The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is... retweets," clarifying that a simple measure of followers "doesn't capture your distribution."
"The dream metric," he said, "is how many people saw your tweet."

Metrics are useful for people to know what they need to do on a platform. If follower count went away, it would need to be replaced by another metric for people to chase after. It's difficult to choose the correct ones. Is it how many times you've been retweeted? Favorited?

We would all love a less ego and popularity focused service, but vanity is a core part of any public-facing representation of yourself. If there was no way to show off how good you are or judge how well you are doing (relative to others), they may be less inclined to participate. It's true in gaming (leaderboards) and sports (championships and records).

I think what Julius is saying is true, /but/ I think that's because Twitter is oriented towards social broadcasting, rather than open discussion.

Its possible there's a way to blend the discussion-orientedness of a service like Branch, with the social broadcasting aspect of Twitter. In a way, I think StackOverflow accomplishes this.

I agree with your points as well, Julius. I definitely understand the need for follower counts in twitter because social broadcasting is completely vanity-driven. It wouldn't be a wise move at all to remove them all together. My initial comment about a world without follower counts intended to be more of a social experiment.
I've been wondering more about what would happen if there was a "follower count blackout" on the site. I've heard of people writing scripts to hide twitter follower counts from their own accounts and others because they want to place more weight on the content of a person's tweets as opposed to a metric.

It's quite fascinating to observe the real-world social implications that metrics like "follower counts" have had. I often hear people talking about others by saying that this person has x number of followers on twitter, making them a "big deal."
It's interesting too that people seem to place much more emphasis on follower count as opposed to Klout score. Klout scores have often been written off as arbitrary numbers that don't tell you much because it isn't quite clear how they are calculated (which I agree with). But nowadays, it's actually easy enough to purchase thousands of spam followers with the push of a button...