I agree with the larger point, especially the bloat. However...
> Do we want to follow someone on Twitter just because they have 30,000 followers?
Yes. Social proof is not going away because it's part of human nature, not a technological gimmick.
> Modern-Day "Best Viewed With" Badges
It's also hard to blame designers for disliking IE, or pointing out that various experimental demo sites will work best with certain browsers, or may be a bit heavy on resources.
> Yes. Social proof is not going away because it's part of human nature, not a technological gimmick.
Technological gimmicks might be expected to tune better though. If the only people I've followed on twitter so far are artists and programmers, it seems to me that it would be a reasonable bet that I'm not going to be interested in superstars. It's odd that people would be expected to click through to follow just based on # of followers.
Since we are already at sharing personal stories: I follow only people who have a balanced follower/following ratio. I refuse to be interest in people who are not interested in me. The number of people who make postings that contain non replaceable information is ridiculously low, and I don't see the point why I should participate in non-reciprocal interactions. But I have a list of about a handful of people who's tweets I have to keep up with just because they are industry thought leaders.
It's odd that people would be expected to click through to follow just based on # of followers.
Why is this so odd? This is a fundamental aspect of human behavior. The # of twitter followers is in indication (not perfectly I might add) of the viability of credibility. This is no different than case stories, customer references, etc. which are all the cornerstones of successfully marketing entities.
Without knowing how many people saw and didn't follow, or followed and then stopped following - without the information that pushes the hypothesis back in the other direction - numbers alone are... well, they're not entirely meaningless - you can take some guesses - but they're not particularly useful.
Like -
If a superstar can get 30k people to follow them, it means less than some random artist getting all the 30k people who know about them to follow them. Because in the latter case you can guess that the weight pushing the hypothesis in the other direction's going to be quite small.
In semantic terms what you're really relying on in the former case to reduce the seize of the contrary hypothesis is the assumption that society is more or less uniform with respect to its interests along the relevant axis - which I find highly questionable.
Then think of where these stickers are going to turn up -you'd expect people to have better first hand evidence available.
So, I find it a bit odd. I'd have assumed it'd get discounted into irrelevance and people would just make up their own minds based on their knowledge of the person.
Social proof seems more important in the US than in Europe. Also, whether designers deserve blame or not is irrelevant. What the practice does is turn away potential visitors[1]/customers[2]. If a business is ok with that, well, then... really?
[1] Google displays a get Chrome message every time I visit Google.com.
[2] Apple's product pages work best in Safari. How's that going to help win over the die-hard Windows users?
It wasn't an Apple product page, it was an Apple HTML5 tech demo they'd crafted around Safari to show off what Safari could do. So it wasn't necessarily about turning away customers, it was about showing off.
> Do we want to follow someone on Twitter just because they have 30,000 followers?
Yes. Social proof is not going away because it's part of human nature, not a technological gimmick.
> Modern-Day "Best Viewed With" Badges
It's also hard to blame designers for disliking IE, or pointing out that various experimental demo sites will work best with certain browsers, or may be a bit heavy on resources.