cohost support

A marker next to an account's name if they follow you would be nice. Currently you will get notified if someone follows you, or you can look through your follower list, but that's not necessarily at hand when you're just browsing.

I respect what you're saying, but I don't think "cultural issues" and "technical issues" are two different things! The purpose of the technology and design of a social media site is to encourage or discourage a particular culture from forming. Site features don't *force* you to behave in a specific way, but the site design and its affordances *influence* user behaviour. Part of the purpose of designing a social media site is choosing what things to subtly emphasize, and what things to subtly discourage.

(In fact, if you take a look at the cohost landing page, staff talk about this pretty explicitly - check the "nobody wants a digital panopticon" and "metrics are ruining our lives" sections.)

That's not to say that cohost has all the UI it'll ever need or that its presentation is perfect, but design elements that *make things easier* or nudge users in one way or another creates a culture. I know staff is paying attention to what they design and why. Having been on Twitter long enough to see what the "X follows you" can encourage, I have pretty strong reasons not to want it here. That's not everyone's experience, so I understand why other people have different perspectives on this.

To speak to the anti-harassment argument, it's not about whether or not a single account follows you, rather it's about heuristics. For instance, a lot of people in your notifications who aren't followers can indicate that a post of yours, or even your entire account is having people pointed to it from elsewhere. In larger accounts where you might not be familiar with all of your followers, knowing if the accounts interacting with you are your followers or not can be important information.

I am retreating slightly on my earlier position on this - it would be nice to have some kind of easier way to check if any given user follows you, or just the ability to show all of one's followers in a list. I just tried to do this and spent four minutes and twenty five seconds holding the end key and clicking load more.

Might make a separate feature request for a happy medium here, actually

i would personally not like to have this information immediately available, it's possible to dig for the information now in the followers page if you really must know, and having it only available there discourages the behavior that leads to the "breaking mutuals" issue socially