The case against follower counts

By Juan · June 2, 2025 #product#design#philosophy

People ask me, sometimes annoyed, why Surbias doesn’t have follower counts. “It’s social. Social means following people.”

Let me make the case for the absence.

What follower counts actually do

A follower count is two things at once. The official function is “this is who follows me, so I can talk to them later.” The unofficial function — and the one that does the heavy lifting in product behavior — is a public legibility score. It tells everyone, including yourself, how important you are on the platform.

That legibility score is what changes behavior. The number is on your profile. It’s visible to strangers. It updates publicly. So you start, half-consciously, optimizing for the number. You post the kind of thing that grew the number last time. You don’t post the things that might shrink it. The platform stops being a place to think out loud and becomes a stage.

This is fine, sort of, for some products. LinkedIn is supposed to be a stage. Twitter mostly is. Instagram is. The follower count is doing what it’s designed to do — turning self-expression into a competitive game with a leaderboard.

For Surbias it would be poison.

Why specifically here

The job Surbias is for is the opposite of performance. Someone shows up because something didn’t work and they want to write it down without packaging it. The whole product premise is that they don’t have to optimize for anyone’s approval — including, importantly, their future self’s approval as a “high-status user.”

Add a follower count and the calculus changes immediately. The first time someone sees their post got 47 reactions and a number ticked up next to their name, the next post is going to be calibrated. They’ll tell a slightly more tellable story. They’ll round the messy edges. They’ll add the redemption arc that wasn’t there.

The honesty drains out. Not because people are dishonest — because the system trained them.

What you lose

I’m not going to pretend there’s no cost.

Discoverability suffers. On a follower-graph platform, you can find people you’d like to read more from. On Surbias, you can’t really. The closest thing is “this category” or “this tag.” If someone writes a story you love, you can’t follow them. You just have to hope they post again, and stumble across it.

Recurring writers don’t get rewarded. People who post fifteen great stories don’t get a different surface than people who posted one mediocre one. Some people would prefer recognition; they don’t get it here.

There’s no celebrity layer. Influencer-style accounts can’t form. This caps a certain kind of growth — no one is going to recommend Surbias because their favorite poster lives there.

These are real costs. I made the trade anyway, because the alternative is worse — the moment any of these problems get “solved” with a follower count, the product I built stops existing.

The substitutes that don’t ruin it

There are weaker, blunter mechanisms that do some of what followers would do without warping behavior.

Categories. You can find more stories like the one you liked. The unit is the topic, not the person.

Tags. Same logic, finer-grained. If you liked a story tagged #burnout, there are more.

Top-of-week / top-of-month. Stories that resonated rise to the top, but the credit goes to the post, not the person — and once the week is over, it falls back into the feed.

Anonymity itself. When you can’t see who wrote what, you can’t form the parasocial loop that makes follower counts addictive in the first place. The post stands or falls on its own.

These are weaker tools. They build a slower, smaller community. Good. Slow and small is what makes the writing honest.

A confession

I check my own Twitter follower count. I check it more than I’d like to admit. I know exactly how many times someone has to like a post before the algorithm fires it through to a new audience. I have, at times, not posted things I wanted to post because I knew they wouldn’t perform.

I don’t want that for the people who use Surbias. I don’t want it for myself when I use Surbias.

So there is no number on your profile. There is no profile, really. There’s a feed of failure stories, and the people who write them and the people who read them are both trying to get to the same thing: the truth, without the math.

— Juan