Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says Follower Count is Meaningless

In a fireside chat in New Delhi, India, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Monday the 'follower count' metric on the social platform is meaningless. Talking in front of a live audience, the Twitter co-founder said it was probably unwise to include and emphasize on the follower count on his social network, a move he said the company did not realize while implementing it back in the day. 'Back then, we were not really thinking about all the dynamics that could ensue afterwards,' he said.

'One of the things we did was we had people follow each other -- so you can be a follower of someone,' Dorsey said, explaining the thinking that went into carving some of the core features of Twitter. The company listed the number of people you had, and 'made the font size a little bit bigger than everything else on the page. We did not really think much about it and moved on to the next problem to solve. What that has done is we put all the emphasis, not intending to, on that number of how many people follow me. So if that number is big and bold, what do people want to do with it? They want to make it go up.'

'So when you open Twitter and you see that number is five. It is actually incentivizing you to increase that number. That may have been right 12 years ago, but I don't think it is right today. I don't think that's the number you should be focused on. I think what is more important is the number of meaningful conversations you're having on the platform. How many times do you receive a reply?'

Dorsey's remarks comes as he has publicly acknowledged that the company is rethinking about some of the core features of Twitter. late last month, a report claimed that Twitter was also thinking about discontinuing the 'likes' feature -- Twitter neither confirmed nor denied it. On Monday, Dorsey reaffirmed that focusing on number of likes and retweets is not healthy. Dorsey is not the only Twitter co-founder who has, of late, shown disdain for the follower count. Last week, Ev Williams expressed a similar sentiment. 'I think showing follower counts was probably ultimately detrimental. It really put in your face that the game was popularity,' he said at a conference.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.