> Though still wildly popular, my sister mentioned that anxiety around “like-to-follower ratios” and “judgmental viewers” has been leading to less posting amongst her and her friends.
There's a lot of weird things that I notice many people do (including myself) related to metrics like this. I'm 24, and a lot of my friends use Snapchat; however, they've switched to using the personal stories over sending actual messages. I really don't like this, mainly because you can see who has viewed your story. And there's a sense of anxiety where you don't want to look at other people's stories if they don't look at yours. So I just avoid it altogether.
Similarly, when I first got Facebook, I never sent any friend requests. So I have about half as many friends as most of my friends have, and over time I realized "number of friends" serves as a surrogate for real-life popularity. There's exceptions; some people deliberately limit their number of friends. But for the most part, those people with 1,100 friends are the social, outgoing, and extroverted whereas those with less than 400 are the weird, introverted quiet people (myself included). So as soon as Facebook released the option to hide your friend count from your profile, I applied it immediately.
I never liked the trend of "trying to be popular" when I was in high school and undergrad, and I like it even less with social media. I wish the newer social networks would design away from concepts like number of followers, and number of likes. It's somewhat disheartening when you post something like "my work was feature on such-and-such national lab's homepage" and it gets 20x less likes than your friend who posts "Shopping at the mall with my friends!!!!"
> There's a lot of weird things that I notice many people do (including myself) related to metrics like this. I'm 24, and a lot of my friends use Snapchat; however, they've switched to using the personal stories over sending actual messages. I really don't like this, mainly because you can see who has viewed your story. And there's a sense of anxiety where you don't want to look at other people's stories if they don't look at yours. So I just avoid it altogether.
Really? I never got that feeling. While I do check to see who looked at my story, I always figured people who didn't check either don't use Snapchat on a daily basis or just didn't have the time to see it within the window. I do get your anxiety when it comes to FB's likes or IG's hearts but since Snapchat doesn't have that and is so ephemeral, I don't get any of that.
There's a lot of weird things that I notice many people do (including myself) related to metrics like this. I'm 24, and a lot of my friends use Snapchat; however, they've switched to using the personal stories over sending actual messages. I really don't like this, mainly because you can see who has viewed your story. And there's a sense of anxiety where you don't want to look at other people's stories if they don't look at yours. So I just avoid it altogether.
Similarly, when I first got Facebook, I never sent any friend requests. So I have about half as many friends as most of my friends have, and over time I realized "number of friends" serves as a surrogate for real-life popularity. There's exceptions; some people deliberately limit their number of friends. But for the most part, those people with 1,100 friends are the social, outgoing, and extroverted whereas those with less than 400 are the weird, introverted quiet people (myself included). So as soon as Facebook released the option to hide your friend count from your profile, I applied it immediately.
I never liked the trend of "trying to be popular" when I was in high school and undergrad, and I like it even less with social media. I wish the newer social networks would design away from concepts like number of followers, and number of likes. It's somewhat disheartening when you post something like "my work was feature on such-and-such national lab's homepage" and it gets 20x less likes than your friend who posts "Shopping at the mall with my friends!!!!"