Social Media ‘Bots

The New York Times today had an article in their Bits Blog about how some folks, craving fame and notoriety in social media circles such as Twitter and Facebook, can for a very small price buy thousands of followers who will retweet, like, favorite, and hashtag your every selfie and TMI update.

For whatever reason, a lot of people (the article mentions celebrities as an example) think that their worth is determined by how big that number is underneath “Followers,” enough so that they don’t mind paying to “cheat.” (“Pardon me, while I whip this out!”)

Now, no doubt about it, since I started this blog almost a year ago, I’ve been pleased to see the number of “subscribers” going up steadily. (We’re at 140 currently.) I enjoy writing and ranting and posting and there’s a certain satisfaction to knowing that people out there are reading and (occasionally) commenting.

There might sometimes be days when I look with a certain envy at the readership numbers for John Scalzi’s “Whatever” or Chuck Wendig’s “TerribleMinds,” especially since I admire those sites and in many ways learned about doing what I do here by reading there before WLTSTF got started.

But I’m not an idiot. (There will be a brief pause while the obligatory snarky comments are made.) I know that sites like “Whatever” and “TerribleMinds” (and thousands of others) are where they are today because of years and years of work and sweat. I’ve been doing this for less than a year.

So while I hope to someday to have my golden words and purple prose and riotous rants followed by thousands or even tens of thousands (tell your friends!), I’m quite happy with being fairly sure that about 99% of you are real humans, not social media bots that I bought. (I’ll let you all figure out who the 1.4 followers are who are software instead of wetware.)

As for those who feel the need to be followed by “thousands” even when they know that they’re really followed by dozens, I’m here to tell you that you need to get a little bit of help and a much tighter grip on reality. The number of social media followers you have really is not any sort of true measure of your worth.

Even if it were (and, again, it’s not), if the headcount of our Twitter or blog followers were truly a valid measure of our societal status, would you want to be the guy or gal who gets caught padding your stats with purchased bot accounts? Do you not realize how easy it is to determine which followers are bots and which are real? Just google “Test for fake Twitter followers” and see how many sites pop up!

I’m reminded of something that happened at my first Worldcon, 1978’s Iguanacon in Phoenix. Harlan Ellison was the Guest of Honor, the ERA Amendment was a huge political battle of the day, Arizona was a non-ratified state, and science fiction fandom was in an uproar accusing uber-liberal Harlan of being a hypocrite. A couple of particularly vocal, strident, and obnoxious fans had been publishing (and I do mean “publishing,” this was all pre-Internet) all kinds of screeds, in part to try to “make a name for themselves” in fandom. (Then again, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

I love fandom, I really do. Everyone should go to a con or ninety-nine, let your hair down, get a hall costume, go filking until breakfast, get a book signed by your favorite author, and so on. But — it’s just fandom.

It’s at best a few thousand people in “true fandom” (whatever the hell that is) and maybe a couple hundred thousand if you throw in everyone who goes to the various ComicCons and so on. It’s fun, it’s an escape, it’s silly — but it’s just fandom. It’s not curing cancer, winning a Pulitzer, solving climate change, landing on Mars, or making first contact with extraterrestrials.

As Harlan put it so eloquently, trying to “make a name for yourself” in fandom is like trying to be “the best leper in the colony.” (I love that phrase!)

I cherish every subscriber to this blog, every follower on Twitter, all of my friends and family on FaceBook. But that’s because you’re all real and I love to communicate with you. It would not stoke my ego to see four or five digit numbers of followers when I would know that 99% of them were fake. If that’s what floats your boat — I can recommend a very good therapist.