How numbers spoiled the internet

Twitter’s not what it used to be, eh? Everyone’s a dick online, right? Well, that’s obviously not really true, but this is the type of thing you hear a lot of. Be it straight-up trolling making people uneasy about saying what they want, or the alt-right/left/whatever shrieking themselves inside out, there’s a lot of noise going on.

So why is that? Is it the internet’s fault? Partially, because as anyone knows, people can be as cocky as they like until someone invents a screen you can actively reach through, and slap someone for being an arsehole.

Obviously, I can only talk about my experience of being online, because the internet is more complex and sprawling than what I’ve seen and said on it, however, I have been hatching a half-baked theory as to why it feels like it has gone a bit wayward of late.

Numbers.

Now, think about everything that annoys you about social media. Is it people attention seeking? Is it people arguing all the time? Is it people clickbaiting you? Is it people coming up with opinions that are weirdly extreme about something pretty trivial? Is it someone doing rapid-fire jokes all day, every pissing day? Is it dodgy fake-news stories?

Whatever it is, chances are it falls under one of two categories — you’re following too many dicks, or they’ve come down with a case of the numbers. Never underestimate the power of just unfollowing people who frustrate you online — especially those who do stuff with the numbers in mind.

I used to be someone obsessed with the numbers. It literally got me jobs. Now, I’ve stopped trying to be A Someone online, and now, I have zero writing jobs. Ah well, it’s not like I was doing writing that could be deemed ‘important’ in any way, shape, or form.

Once upon a time, when the internet was all fields, people just mucked around online, and then forums happened. Good, old-fashioned trolling (winding people up, rather than the stuff that happens now which is referred to as trolling) became pretty commonplace, and eventually, they paved the way for social media.

MySpace and the like, saw people able to show off how popular they were, and even organise their Top Friends list, which meant that you could effectively make people compete for your affections. I’m not sure people actively made people compete, but it was certainly the first time I noticed that users were able to show off their popularity.

Eventually, MySpace fell by the wayside, and now Twitter and Facebook rule the roost (at least, the roost that exists outside of our phones — Snapchat really is giving this pair a run for their money).

What Twitter and Facebook brought to the table was numbers — you could see how many comments and shares someone’s update had got on Facebook, and on Twitter, there’s tallies for how many times you’ve been retweeted and a literal follower count, so people can see how popular you are.

Thanks to these things, we’ve got a fair amount of trouble. People look at someone’s follower count, to see if they’re worth listening to (you’ll notice that, when people get into an online spat, someone might have “Look at this tit, with their 49 followers” levelled at them). Users who have 900k followers will get RTed, even when they’re saying something inane… and then someone else sees that the tweet has 104k RTs, and they give it more value that is sometimes necessary.

Ever noticed how you mate from school did a funny tweet that made you laugh-swallow your tea painfully, and then some Twitter-famous person does a similar, inferior tweet a week later, and one has 4 retweets, and the other has 160,000 and ends up in a round-up in a newspaper?

The numbers on social media have made a lot of people competitive. I was one of them, so I know all about this nonsense. And it is nonsense, because these numbers generally don’t count for anything. Through this competition, we end up with a lot of people getting hysterical, either through a feeling of being ganged-up on, a will to be notorious/trending for 10 minutes, or whatever it is that drives them... the numbers are always in mind though.

People create hordes of imagined enemies, thanks to the numbers. People talk to their ‘tweeps’ (which is the social media equivalent of a celebrity saying ‘fans’) when they actually mean ‘people’. The numbers, it seems, has helped too many forget that they’re literally dealing with a person, lumping them into one big pot of numbers.

Going viral is a fixture now, and the promise of it sees some really irritating (and sometimes worrying) behaviour. Check out those who tune into The X Factor or Question Time or a big sporting event, just to slag it off in the hope of some retweets. Seeing as people online have a tendency to reward negative behaviour (more on that another time), the numbers pile up, and you end up with competitive misery too.

Of course, social media isn’t a cesspit — there’s a lot of genuinely funny and smart people knocking around, and as well as that, there’s people trying to do morally good things too… you know what I’m talking about though.

So what do you do? Well, I think it’d be interesting if the big-gun social media companies ran an experiment where they hid all the numbers for a couple of months, to see if it puts the scuppers on dickish, hysterical behaviour.

We genuinely shouldn’t care how many retweets something has had. Knowing how many followers someone has is information no-one actually needs. These numbers would only be hidden — each Twitter user still has access to an analytics page, so if you really are going for a job, or use social media for your job, you can still access the numbers to talk of your ‘engagement’.

If you’re able to access the numbers on a separate page, rather than seeing them tacked on to literally everything you say, that extra step would hopefully mean everyone stops putting so much value into them.

The only thing that would matter, is the quality of the thing you’ve said. You wouldn’t be dismissed for ‘only having X amount of followers’, tweets would regain value by what is in them, rather than its popularity or the popularity of the user, and hopefully, everyone would stop this wanting to be so notorious. Celebrities would still appear in everyone’s timeline, but that’s celebrity for you — Emma Watson makes more headlines than Steve From The Green Grocers Down The Road.

Either way, it’d be good to take the sting out of the nonsense somehow.

There’s a lot of chat about ‘engagement’, but really, I think the quality of the replies or whatever, is better than just shifting ‘big numbers’ for the sake of it.

I obviously haven’t thought this through properly and I’m just pissing into the wind with an idea, and clearly, Twitter and Facebook run business models based on the fact you can see these numbers so they’ll never do it in a million years.

I just think that getting rid of numbers could stop a lot of needless bullshit that blights a thing that was once considered to be a fun, distracting, and normally daft thing. More daftness please.