cohost support

I don't know why this isn't shown right now, is it perhaps an attempt to avoid popularity contests? I can understand that motive, but knowing roughly how many followers someone has can be useful.

For example, on Twitter, I kinda dread getting followed by people with very large (>10K) follower counts, because I know that if they retweet something I post, I'll be getting a flood of notifications. I'm sure cohost will eventually have this kind of issue.

Also, if someone new follows me and they have very few followers (say, less than a hundred), that suggests they're a fairly new or inactive poster, and it might inform how I choose to interact with them.

The feature wouldn't necessarily have to show who someone's followers are, or even the exact number. I do think it's most useful if people can't hide theirs though.

A related request is https://help.antisoftware.club/support/discussions/topics/62000183135 which is about being able to see the actual list of who someone follows / who their followers are. I think that's orthogonal though, and in particular, I think it would be reasonable to always show how many followers someone has, even if they choose to hide who they are.

Hmm, I guess being able to see how many people someone follows is also useful, mostly to have a sense of how big a portion of their timeline you're going to take up. Maybe that information could only be shown if someone follows you, though, because I can't think of a reason to show it otherwise…

Ah, I hadn't considered the compulsively-checking-if-number-went-up side of things. I don't really know what can be done about that though, as I assume a setting isn't going to stop you if you find the urge to check it. But if a setting is enough, there could be one to hide your follow count from yourself?

Please don't do this, it's only ever used for weird witch hunts or derisive posts about how ppl have too many/too few followers. 0% positive contribution to the site

While I've seen my fair share of the nastiness on Twitter in my decade of using the site, I don't think being able to see follower counts has been a notable feature of the nastiness?

I think it's cool not having people judge folks by their follower count.

You see it all the time where someone is a real ass to a guy with 400 followers but a real peach to a guy with 4000 in the very next post.

I understand the value of internet clout, and having those numbers at-hand for creators to leverage during like, sponsor negotiations is great for them, but it'd be nice if it could be implemented in a way that's not a big flippin' deal.

Being able to turn off notifications for posts that get scooped up by a throng of people might be nice as an individual feature though.

Not to X-Y problem here but i think there's some alternative means to solve the problems at hand

"[a low follower count] suggests they're a fairly new or inactive poster"

a potential option is to show the relative age of a poster—"joined recently" on new accounts

" I kinda dread getting followed by people with very large (>10K) follower counts"

the problem here is that a low follower count follower might have a high follower count follower, so it looks safe, but your post could still get shunted off into main character space

i think it's better to have tools to handle a post getting too big for its own good, like

- posts that have a "don't let people share this" option

- being able to ignore notifications on shared posts

another problem with follower counts being public is that it's the sort of numbers game that brands play, measuring their reach, or worse, the sort of thing where your boss finds your account and asks you to chost about work

Personally, I agree that I don't need or want to see how many followers other people have, but I'd like to see how many *I* have. I like to understand the scale of reach my account has. (If there's already a way to see this I apologize, but I haven't found it yet)

To add to that, I'd also love if like and share counts on posts were visible to the author of the post but not to anyone else.

To me, comparison to others and popularity contests are the negative effects of these "vanity numbers". Removing them avoids all that, and forces people to not reduce a post's worth to just its like count. I love that cohost does this.

But I think there might still be value in optionally seeing the numbers for your own posts... I could be wrong and if this was internally discussed by the team and consciously not implemented I'd love to hear the reasoning. Maybe it's just twitter brain poisoning and it'll fade, but as a user I find myself wanting to privately see my own follower/like/share counts :)

I'm strongly opposed to having counts of things. Cohost is healthy for me in a way twitter wasn't because there is not all these numbers.