Nobody I follow on Twitter thinks like this. The idea of a Twitter account having some intrinsic social capital baffles me. The "old" Twitter accounts? The "new" Twitter accounts?<p>I follow Daniel J. Bernstein (@hashbreaker, a relatively new account) because he's Daniel J. Bernstein. I am interested in what DJB has to say.<p>I am in conversations with other people who are interested in what DJB has to say. We comment on the same threads. They wind up in my feed. Not infrequently, one of those people will say something interesting. I will click the "follow" button. Others do the same. Their follower count grows.<p>In what other way could this system meaningfully work? Why on earth would I follow someone because of their Twitter stats? What do I care how Twitter manages those stats? If you want a chance to be heard, say something interesting.
First-mover advantage is a characteristic of a great many systems. Disrupting that, out of concerns for justice or merely to provide a more compelling reason for newcomers to make use of a service or tool, is an interesting and ongoing challenge.<p>Another approach is to randomly present new content to users. Google's attempted numerous hacks to both solve the "empty streams" problem and break out of filter bubbles at G+, though many of these have been less than satisfactory. The "What's Hot" feature (now deprecated to "Explore") had the typical problems of juvenilia and vapidity, as well as the problem for those whose posts were promoted to it of attracting vast amounts of generally unwanted attention, to the extent that people were begging <i>not</i> to have posts featured.<p>It's not a specific problem of Twitter, there's a challenge in new-content discovery and promotion generally. I'm not sure that the "active users" hack is a sufficient fix. I do feel that leveraging both technical (e.g., algorithmically determined ratings) and social (FOAF type recommendations) tends to produce more useful results.