Okay so in case you somehow missed it, this was a rough week to be a social media stock. Facebook's earnings call on Wednesday sent their share price off a cliff Thursday, something like $119 billion in value gone in a single day, which is apparently the biggest one-day loss any company has ever had. Everyone and their uncle is writing about that today so I'm not going to bother rehashing it. Go read literally any other tech site, they've all got the same chart.
What I actually want to talk about is smaller and dumber and, honestly, more relevant to me personally: my own Twitter follower count has been quietly bleeding out all week, and I finally figured out why.
Twitter announced a while back, early July I think, that they were going to start scrubbing "locked" accounts (the ones flagged for suspicious activity, basically probably-bots-or-hacked-accounts that Twitter locks and asks to verify) out of everyone's follower totals. They said big accounts would see the drop first because bots love to follow anyone famous, but they warned it'd trickle down eventually. I read that post, shrugged, and forgot about it.
Then this week I actually looked at my numbers for the first time in probably a month, because their Q2 earnings report came out Friday and their stock got hammered too (down about 20% in a day, though obviously nowhere near Facebook's scale in raw dollars). And sure enough: I went from 1,842 followers to 1,791 over about four days. Fifty-one gone, just like that. No unfollow notifications, no drama, just numbers quietly ticking down every time I refreshed the analytics page like an idiot at 11pm.
Fifty-one people is nothing in the grand scheme. Obama reportedly lost like 2 million followers in this purge. But it's MY fifty-one, and there's something weirdly deflating about watching a number you don't even care about go down anyway. I want to be clear I don't think follower count means anything real. I've said that here before, probably more than once. It's a vanity number. It doesn't pay my hosting bill, it doesn't make my posts better, and half the accounts I follow have follower counts in the tens of thousands and post genuinely worse content than my friend Dev's barely-read food blog. And yet. There I was, refreshing.
Here's the tangent, because I can't help myself: I remember getting my first 1,000 followers on here back around 2013, and I actually screenshotted it. I have no idea where that screenshot is now, probably lost in some old external hard drive graveyard, but I remember being stupidly proud of it at the time, like it was some kind of achievement unlocked. Looking back that's a little embarrassing to admit. A thousand people clicking a follow button once is not the same as a thousand people who actually care what I write, and I think it took me a couple more years of blogging to actually internalize that distinction. This blog's been running since November 2011 now and I still don't think I've fully made peace with the difference between an audience and a number.
Anyway. The bigger point, if there is one, is that this whole week has been a decent reminder of how fake a lot of these platform numbers have always been. Twitter's own earnings call admitted their monthly active users basically flatlined, partly because of this cleanup. Facebook's stock cratered on user growth worries too. Two different companies, same week, same underlying story: the engagement numbers everyone's been reporting for years were softer than they looked, and the market noticed all at once.
I don't have some grand conclusion about what this means for the future of social media or whatever. I just know my little counter says 1,791 now instead of 1,842, and weirdly, I feel a bit more honest about it than I did last week. Fifty-one ghosts, gone. Probably for the best.