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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.

OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers), and I guess my point is when you have that kind of presence you open yourself up to being a "pseudo-public" person. Sometimes, you need to do this (if you're a politician, for example). But usually you don't.

People will get more riled up when the person they're crucifying is famous - clout-chasing is a real thing. Although you (sadly) sometimes have exceptions to this rule, so you're right that it's not a complete solution.

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> OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers),

He has 16k followers https://twitter.com/pasql

Oops, mea culpa. I mistook another screenshot in his post to be his own account. Yeah, 16k isn't that much; pretty sad.

> isn't that much

16 thousand people follow him. That's way more than enough to be considered a 'public person'

Not at all. I had more than that before I quit twitter and I am about as minor a figure in a sub-sub-sub-industry as one can be; actually-famous people have millions. Not-quite-famous people have hundreds of thousands.

No, 16k accounts follow his. Of that, maybe a few hundred actually have users behind them that look at his tweets with any kind of frequency.

You can buy that kind of following for the price of a bottle of wine.

Historically, even just a few decades ago, if you had reach of sixteen thousand (!!) people, you were incredibly publicly exposed.

To think that we now file it as “not that much” is something I can’t wrap my mind around.

It's not much different from compute power increases over the same time period. Once more is the norm then less becomes inadequate.

Not really. If you put a classified ad in a Chicago paper saying you were having a garage sale, you were exposed to a million people and had the direct attention of the many thousands who would actually read the ad. If you spent an hour putting up flyers at major intersections near the bar you were playing at on Thursday night, thousands of people per hour would see them.

It's important to remember that there are as many people following 10K people as are being followed by 10K people. They aren't really paying attention to 10K people's photos of their lunches or stray observations on Ohio sports.

No one actually has the reach of their entire follower count. If there was a way to analyze your own followers to root out Bots and inactive people, who knows how much lower the number would be. That isn’t counting active users who don’t pay attention to you. And even if they pay attention to you, it might be in a non caring way. Outside of 16K being a big number. That number alone doesn’t mean much when it comes to modern social media.

A good easy contrast is the “phenom” of how flighty, not loyal, and weaker of a connection TikTok followers are. I believe it is very hard to go from being big on Tiktok to elsewhere. Contrasted by other social media.

Also. This is all coming from some one who has never had more than 200 of so followers on any social media.

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