Hey everyone,

You might notice your profile page looks a little bit different. Profile pages no longer display the number of Followers and Following. (You can still view this information by clicking the ‘View All’ button on the Followers / Following panel.) The number of profile comments are no longer displayed too.

Why do this? We want to make sure people see someone’s projects, studios, and connections and not focus too much on the numbers. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000. Scratch is a place for creating, collaborating, and supporting fellow Scratchers.

The Scratch Mentors put together an awesome remix project about “What is the meaning of followers?” http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/projects/25999074/ Check it out and see how other Scratchers think about followers! Feel free to share your thoughts too!

oh. ok!

Oh, that explains a lot!

Nice! But, scratch mentors doesn't have an apostrophe.

EDIT: Fmt, 3 seconds… ;n;

This was a very wise decision on your part Scratch Team. Thank you!

O.K! I saw that when entering my profile. Good to see improvements to the Scratch Website!

this is a good update. good job MIT!

Great! This could be a solution to the f4f problem!

I've also updated the Wiki - Here

Cool update, though! However, I think the comment count should be brought back. Just my thoughts

(Normally I don't quote Opening Posts, but my grammar nazi inside is bursting out.)

speakvisually wrote:

Hey everyone,
-snip-
The number of profile comments is no longer displayed, either.
-snip-

Honestly, why even have a follower carousel if all it does is display the last couple of followers?
I, for one, would like to be able to see my comment amount, as well as my followers/following count right off the bat without needing to click ‘view all.’
I don't support this update.
ALSO, erm, what's the point of removing the follower count so nobody can see it if anybody can click view all? It's like, adding one more step that I doubt will stop f4f or follow bragging.

speakvisually wrote:

Hey everyone,

You might notice your profile page looks a little bit different. Profile pages no longer display the number of Followers and Following. (You can still view this information by clicking the ‘View All’ button on the Followers / Following panel.) The number of profile comments are no longer displayed too.

Why do this? We want to make sure people see someone’s projects, studios, and connections and not focus too much on the numbers. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000. Scratch is a place for creating, collaborating, and supporting fellow Scratchers.

The Scratch Mentors put together an awesome remix project about “What is the meaning of followers?” http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/projects/25999074/ Check it out and see how other Scratchers think about followers! Feel free to share your thoughts too!

Oh, yeah, I agree .u.

WHEW… now i can stop worrying about followers…

speakvisually wrote:

Hey everyone,

You might notice your profile page looks a little bit different. Profile pages no longer display the number of Followers and Following. (You can still view this information by clicking the ‘View All’ button on the Followers / Following panel.) The number of profile comments are no longer displayed too.

Why do this? We want to make sure people see someone’s projects, studios, and connections and not focus too much on the numbers. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000. Scratch is a place for creating, collaborating, and supporting fellow Scratchers.

The Scratch Mentors put together an awesome remix project about “What is the meaning of followers?” http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/projects/25999074/ Check it out and see how other Scratchers think about followers! Feel free to share your thoughts too!

I think it would be cool if you would have the option if you could or couldn't see the numbers, so if you wanted to see them you could and if you didn't want to you would not have to.

Ah, hopefully it will discourage follow4follow accounts.

YAY

NoxSpooth wrote:

Ah, hopefully it will discourage follow4follow accounts.

That may be the whole point of removing the following/follower count.

I also want to add that the comment count maybe have been removed to get discourage messages like these: “800th Comment! ”

Why I believe that this update is bad:

1. Taking the follow numbers away from the profile page does nothing. Well, it does do something. It annoys me because I have to load one more page just to check more followers. This means that I'll hardly know when somebody unfollows me. I like to know if that happens because I don't want to be advertising something to repeatedly and annoying people, being too active… etc. However, about the people who are obsessed with followers, how will that discourage them? If they have enough time to spam several hundred people with follow requests, how is clicking one little button going to get them to stop? And taking the numbers away doesn't mean that they don't want followers any more.

2. I like to keep track of everything on my profile and projects so that I know what people like, what types of projects encourage what types of activity, and so on. For example, I can tell you that my Updates project got quite a number of random comments on my profile, love its on my other projects, and not many love its for itself (compared to my other things of course). Now I know that disguising a game as an Updates project is a terrible marketing ploy. If there were no numbers, then how would I know not to do that again?

3. When you visit a profile, you usually have no idea how good or bad a user is at Scratch. Should you check out their projects? Should you not? Is the user just getting all of their thumbnails from another user that makes them look better at Scratch? Well, to determine this, many Scratchers look at the number of followers. If there are a lot of followers in a short amount of time, then you know that it's probably worth checking out their projects! I usually will compare the number of followers to the joined date so that I know if the given Scratcher is something new in the world of Scratch. I'm not saying that it's not worth checking out projects if the user doesn't have many followers, but I subconsciously do this a lot and it's really annoying if I need to click twice more to do this! That's a big waste of time! (Thanks to other Scratchers for reminding me of this).

4. In a matter of minutes, I've several Scratchers have all gotten annoyed at this change. They are also some reputable Scratchers, such as: VoltageGames, WILL_WAM, ELSA_THE_CONQUEROR… need I continue?

Yep.

List of more annoyed Scratchers: -Flash-, TheAnimationShow, Flygon12345678, -Because_Im_Batman-, PRETTY_GIRL, dinocatmeow, SnowKittyartist, helloyowazzup, BLACKSWIFT, THEGENERALESS, aminameow4, GetWithTheProgram, MTCRAFTER, RED-drag0n, Lilry1, austin360, SUPERDOGGY, SIFEF, sophielymes527, Fox16, HAnthony, AQUAFLAME, -THEDOCTOR-, GRANNYCOOKIES, andrewjl, tiny288, Infinity-, Eugenbross, gcenac, TheMistyPuppy2000, DARKCRYSTALBALL, Epicness123, JETPAC, flexaxu, __–Programmer–__, MiniMacro, L-Rignity, jrezneckbhds, violin16, hacker, Teanaway, Story_Teller, Kreyos (KILOZ)…

Now, how many Scratchers are there? How many don't like this? I'm going to let you count and see how annoying that is.

As a simple note, Scratchers in all capitals are well known Scratchers who have worked hard for their popularity. They are all annoyed at you right now. Is this what you wanted?

Please revert this change.

-Scratchifier and many more-

Oh!

Edit:

I personally don't really like this update. Sure follows for follows can be annoying but being able to see each others followers also can be used as encouragement to try harder to make projects. Seeing someone with more followers than you have can encourage you to make more effort into your projects or at least get close to reaching the amount of follows that that person has.

And also, I don't want to have to load another page just to check my followers or who I'm following.

You might think that taking away the follow number will encourage people to make better projects. However, seeing the number of followers I have makes me PUMPED to make better projects. Making me press a button to get me pumped just gets really annoying.