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Comment by mpk | Hacker News Reader

What always surprises me about lists like this is that there are people who follow thousands of others and they still get taken seriously.

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On Google+, you can quite reasonably follow thousands of others and still keep track of everything your friends and family post, plus the occasional random.

Why is that surprising? What's wrong about following thousands of people?

Following people implies at least a very basic interest in what they have to say. You can't follow more than a few hundred people and still keep track of what they're saying (and that's with a low average post count). If you're following thousands you're either a bot or just racking up numbers in which case the follow relationship is totally meaningless.

I would have agreed with you once but now I think that, to a certain extent, maintaining social connections can be a bit like physical fitness. I could say you can't run under a 4 minute mile or a single race of > 100 miles, yet people have and do while almost none of us on HN ever will.

My change of heart has come after 5 years of using Twitter. I could only follow 100 people well at first but somehow it crept up and up. I've had quite a few culls and now I'm at 1000 people I follow and whenever I go through the list I recognize almost every name. It's not quite a 4 minute mile but I've been able to get at least a feel for those 1000 folks and know they're ones I appreciate following.

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