By Aaron Miller-
Twitter co-founder and board member, Eva Williams, has admitted that showing follower counts on user’s profiles was a bad idea. The same goes for the Suggested User List, a project that Williams was highly critical of when he was CEO.”
Williams’s comments come at a time when CEO, Jack Dorsey has been spreading the ideology of boosting the “health” of social media- the platform he created. Dorsey once commented that follower counts can give users a negative incentive. Follower counts have been the source of pride and self importance felt by many twitter users.
Williams admits Twitter succeeded in the early days due to the twitter count features He recalled his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2009 when there was a highly publicized race between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to have the first Twitter account with a million followers.
“That’s the most amazing publicity of all time. So it’s easy to say in retrospect — today — maybe we shouldn’t have follower counts,” Williams said. “A lot of these things drove growth, and if we hadn’t had them, maybe someone else would have done them and built a much more dominant platform.
“But today that’s not necessarily healthy.”I think showing follower counts was probably ultimately detrimental,” Williams was speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. “It really put in your face that the game was popularity.” Williams was speaking Web Summit in London Lisbon
The “worst” product move, though, in Williams’s eyes, was the Suggested User List, which allowed new tweeters to automatically follow a list of accounts that Twitter thought would be a good starting point for people new to the service without the faintest idea of who to follow. That led to some accounts achieving massive early success without necessarily providing a ton of value to the new follower.
“This was my fault,” Williams says, in a candid admission. “Those weren’t really interest-based follows, and then someone who had grown their following organically compares themselves to them. It’s inauthentic.”
FAULT
“This was my fault,” Williams said. “Those weren’t really interest-based follows, and then someone who had grown their following organically compares themselves to them. It’s inauthentic.” Now the CEO of a different content company, Medium, and has taken an interest in the state of journalism.
He’s feeling pretty good about the way media companies are gravitating toward pay-for-content models, he said, but he’s not in a rush to pay for a media company himself a la Jeff Bezos or Marc Benioff. He admitted when asked, though, that he’s certainly given some thought to buying one.
“Sure,” he said after a pause. “Who doesn’t think about buying media companies?”