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Comment by danschumann | Hacker News Reader

Experiment: A social network that kicks people off after X,000 followers

In a way, you could "cancel" someone by following them, but if enough people don't also follow them. Then you just see their tweets.

This is actually kind of an interesting idea. What kind of social dynamics would play? On one hand, you want to see someones tweets, but if you follow them, you may cancel them.

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I think the "canceling" is too extreme, but the idea of limiting the number of people can follow / be followed by seems interesting, especially in the context of Dunbar's number [0] where a person could only really maintain ~150 connections.

Users would then need to decide who's more important to their feed, their best friend's sister or Justin Bieber. It may lead to interesting social dynamics in the same way that Twitters 140-character restriction created new discourse dynamics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

People would just create multiple accounts.

No matter how high you build the wall, someone will always bring a taller ladder.

Maybe make it cost money to start an account, and you can only follow x00 people whereas it takes x000 to get.. "dissipated"

Slight tweak - rather than X,000 followers, kick the top x-percentile. Allows people to come back on, and enhances that delicious "cancel them at the risk of making them more listened to" game theory that you have identified.

Bots could instantly destroy whatever account they want, and people would feel guilty about following someone/something popular and just not do it, which eliminates the point of a follow system except for for personal friends/family. So basically it would make it more like Facebook and anyone with a bit of time/money could almost definitely delete anyone's account they wanted to.

>A social network that kicks people off after X,000 followers

and names a dog park after them.

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