i had heard, and don't know how credible this is, that early on there was discussion at Twitter about hiding follower/following counts from public view. The notion was they were designing a system w constraints (140 characters) and were willing to buck convention. Would love to hear from Jack or Ev on this one day.
If such a discussion was had, I'd also be very curious to hear the details of it. I imagine the followers display was carefully considered, and I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for the conversations on reasons why vs. reasons why not.
Part of me thinks, well, maybe they could just split the difference and make the display an opt-outable feature.
But I think the genie is well out of the bottle at this point. We now inhabit a world in which a lot of people make their livings based on Twitter fanbase reach (or, really, on the public display thereof, given that they're not actually capable of engaging every single follower with every single tweet). And I think there'd be an interesting psychological game afoot if various people started opting out of the display. Would others see that as some sort of admission of lower status? Would they see it as somehow antisocial? Personally speaking, I think it would be a nice feature to have, and I wouldn't care about who did and did not display his counts. But if I've learned anything in my life, it's that my preferences are atypical.
