Thursday, April 29, 2010

Follower Obsession

When did this whole blog following thing become an obsession? As of late, I've seen dozens of people holding contests to celebrate their following numbers. The obsession is like contagious. I don't recall bloggers getting overly excited about their counter stats. But ever since this following feature was implemented, it's non stop. What happened to the bloggers who didn't care how many people were reading posts?

This isn't to say I don't appreciate 21 people signing up to see what my next ramblings will be. But I'm not getting my panties in a bunch because the number isn't in the 600 range. I am curious how the whole idea came about; to turn blogs in to like mini-cults. Counter stats and RSS feeds aren't enough. We need a feature to display the cult-like following some blogs have with readers soaking in their every word as gospel.

If you want to celebrate your reader status, by all means, do so, but I just think it isn't anything to whine about if your follower numbers aren't in the thousands after a few short months. The obsession is kind of scary. You don't think there is some virtual zombie bug going around, do you?

4 comments:

Aaron Polson said...

I read recently (on some industry blog) that until your followers reaches some ridiculous number like 25K, major publishers/agents won't care.

I might just remove mine.

Andrea Allison said...

Seems pretty ridiculous to me. What happened to the days where publishers/agents judged an author's work by their own merit?

Aaron Polson said...

Oh, the writing does matter first, it's just that any number of followers won't until it reaches obscene proportions.

Andrea Allison said...

Well, it's still ridiculous.