Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says follower counts don’t matter

Image: Getty Images / Drew Angerer

We didn’t expect this!

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at a fireside chat in New Delhi on Monday that the number of followers a person has on Twitter is basically meaningless, according to a Slashdot report.

He said that founders Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams didn’t consider “all the dynamics that could ensue afterwards” when they built Twitter to show a follower count in 2006.

“So when you open Twitter and you see that number is five. It is actually incentivizing you to increase that number. That may have been right 12 years ago, but I don’t think it is right today,” Dorsey reportedly said. “I don’t think that’s the number you should be focused on. I think what is more important is the number of meaningful conversations you’re having on the platform. How many times do you receive a reply?” 

His comments reiterate a point he’s been making all year. In March, Dorsey said Twitter is searching for ways to root out trolling, bullying, hate speech, and political manipulation on the network. In order to do that, the company put out a request for proposals on how to measure “Twitter Health Metrics.” The request asked organizations to submit ways to measure “conversational health.”

That wasn’t the only surprising comment Dorsey made, either. According to The Next Web, Dorsey said at the same fireside chat that Twitter is thinking about adding an edit button to let people fix typos in tweets.

“You have to pay attention to what are the use cases for the edit button. A lot of people want the edit button because they want to quickly fix a mistake they made. Like a misspelling or tweeting the wrong URL. That’s a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time,” he reportedly said.

Dorsey apparently emphasized that tweets would not be editable forever, because he thinks people would abuse the feature to alter statements and mislead users.

“We have been considering this for a while and we have to do in the right way. We can’t just rush it out. We can’t make something which is distracting or takes anything away from the public record,” he said, according to The Next Web.

There’s no word on how long it would be before these type of updates would be implemented. Representatives for Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

But it’s worth saying that regardless of whether these updates are made, Twitter should probably prioritize its white supremacist problem.