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!

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was confused at first, but now I got the hang of it.

Scratchifier wrote:

Blueinkproductions wrote:

Scratchifier wrote:

speakvisually wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! There are a lot of thoughts going on here. Tough to know where to start :]

In stepping back: What we're talking about is a change to move the number of Followers from the profile page to the View All page. Which is one click deeper. I know we might lose sight of this when chatting :]

I'm interested to hear more about the ‘at a glance’ aspect of viewing the number of followers? Because I think Scratcher's both new and old make wonderful projects. So, to hear Scratcher's might be judged on the number of followers they have speaks to reason why this changed was put into place.

Same concept as this: might as well take out all of the icons, so somebody doesn't get judged on how good of an icon they have. Oh, and the project thumbnails, since every project should get the same number of views regardless of quality.

NO! That's ridiculous.

Is Scratch going to really become so socialist that good Scratchers are rewarded with absolutely nothing?

Why do you keep talking about socialism like it's a bad thing?

Simply, because we're not Cybermen or Borg.

Now, more complicated. God made us (or at least I believe) with our own special talents. Why reduce our talents to the lowest possible level?

You don't need a number to increase your talents. If you don't think of followers as numbers, why do you care if you can't see the numbers?

Total support. While I am moving on from scratch, I hope that this will make scratch a better place for new scratchers.

I have mixed feelings about this update. It is good because then people don't judge other people by their followers. But it's not so good when I want to look at how many followers I have and feel proud but don't see a number.

Scratchifier wrote:

Blueinkproductions wrote:

Scratchifier wrote:

speakvisually wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! There are a lot of thoughts going on here. Tough to know where to start :]

In stepping back: What we're talking about is a change to move the number of Followers from the profile page to the View All page. Which is one click deeper. I know we might lose sight of this when chatting :]

I'm interested to hear more about the ‘at a glance’ aspect of viewing the number of followers? Because I think Scratcher's both new and old make wonderful projects. So, to hear Scratcher's might be judged on the number of followers they have speaks to reason why this changed was put into place.

Same concept as this: might as well take out all of the icons, so somebody doesn't get judged on how good of an icon they have. Oh, and the project thumbnails, since every project should get the same number of views regardless of quality.

NO! That's ridiculous.

Is Scratch going to really become so socialist that good Scratchers are rewarded with absolutely nothing?

Why do you keep talking about socialism like it's a bad thing?

Simply, because we're not Cybermen or Borg.

Now, more complicated. God made us (or at least I believe) with our own special talents. Why reduce our talents to the lowest possible level?

Now I have a response, but it's not for the forums.

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!

ok. sorry. i have another post that says i want you to give us back the numbers.

dinocatmeow wrote:

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!

ok. sorry. i have another post that says i want you to give us back the numbers.

why?

FINALLY, although maybe u can add hwere only the user can see the number of followers THEY have?

cottonbloom wrote:

FINALLY, although maybe u can add hwere only the user can see the number of followers THEY have?

now that is an interesting idea. I like it. This way people can see their follower count but can't brag about it because no one else can see it.

cottonbloom wrote:

FINALLY, although maybe u can add hwere only the user can see the number of followers THEY have?

Interesting idea! So, you are proposing to only have the Follower count visible to profile owner?

Good to see so many people sharing opinions about this change!

However – with respect – some of these scenarios don't really ring true to me. Are there really so many 10,000 follower Scratchers that you need to be able to differentiate them from Scratchers with 10 followers? I wasn't aware there were so many Scratchers with quite so many followers.

I can definitely see reasons to push back on this change. Even though it's relatively small, it does affect something you (we) all care about, and something you interact with every day. I'd like to understand the concerns about it better. Some have said that having the follower count immediately visible allows people to make a short hand judgement about the likely quality of the projects. They then use that judgement to decide whether to invest the 30 seconds or so that it takes to click on the projects and check them out.

But how do you come to that profile in the first place? Isn't whatever gets you to that profile page more important / more likely to influence your decision about whether or not to view the projects on it than the follower count? We don't allow people to search by numbers of followers - so there must be some other way you are scanning profiles.

Finally I would ask - is follower count really that strongly correlated with project quality? I've seen some pretty amazing projects by folks with no followers - or very few. What about projects by people who don't generally participate socially on the site and have very few followers?

To conclude: I'm all for figuring out / talking about better ways to connect Scratchers to projects they find interesting. I guess I just don't see follower count as so crucial to that. And the negative aspects of focusing on the numbers – the way it can create the sense that Scratch is some kind of popularity contest - seem to outweigh any small benefits in terms of finding good projects.

Anyhow - please keep the discussion going - because if there is something really important here we're not seeing, I definitely want to understand it better!

Scratchifier wrote:

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, -Flash-, TheAnimationShow… need I continue?

Edit: List of more annoyed Scratchers: Flygon12345678, -Because_Im_Batman-, Pretty_Girl, dinocatmeow, SnowKittyartist, helloyowazzup, Infernous, Blackswift

Please revert this change.

-Scratchifier and many more-

Hmm… But people can be really good but have less followers

i think it is a good idea! But I also Agree with CottonBloom also

Lightnin wrote:

Finally I would ask - is follower count really that strongly correlated with project quality? I've seen some pretty amazing projects by folks with no followers - or very few. What about projects by people who don't generally participate socially on the site and have very few followers?

I found a scratcher with no followers and extraordinary projects that are better than projects from scratchers with over 1k follows a while ago. It also seems like people are biased to like a scratcher or not based on the follower count. There have been some projects in the featured projects section that people say “aren't good” and “doesn't deserve to be featured”. When a scratcher with thousand(s) of follows shares a project with the same quality, it can easily get front paged.

EDIT: this is an agreement with lightnin in case ppl can't tell.

Hello! I see the new change you made! I honestly really think it helps with the whole popularity thing. Popularity isn't important! But I think you should be able to see your own number of followers because some people like seeing how many people cared enough to click the follow button, and it makes some people happy(: yeah. I think you should be able to see your own with out having to go to the “view all” page. Thanks! (:
-Clare Bear

Lightnin wrote:

Good to see so many people sharing opinions about this change!

However – with respect – some of these scenarios don't really ring true to me. Are there really so many 10,000 follower Scratchers that you need to be able to differentiate them from Scratchers with 10 followers? I wasn't aware there were so many Scratchers with quite so many followers.

I can definitely see reasons to push back on this change. Even though it's relatively small, it does affect something you (we) all care about, and something you interact with every day. I'd like to understand the concerns about it better. Some have said that having the follower count immediately visible allows people to make a short hand judgement about the likely quality of the projects. They then use that judgement to decide whether to invest the 30 seconds or so that it takes to click on the projects and check them out.

But how do you come to that profile in the first place? Isn't whatever gets you to that profile page more important / more likely to influence your decision about whether or not to view the projects on it than the follower count? We don't allow people to search by numbers of followers - so there must be some other way you are scanning profiles.

Finally I would ask - is follower count really that strongly correlated with project quality? I've seen some pretty amazing projects by folks with no followers - or very few. What about projects by people who don't generally participate socially on the site and have very few followers?

To conclude: I'm all for figuring out / talking about better ways to connect Scratchers to projects they find interesting. I guess I just don't see follower count as so crucial to that. And the negative aspects of focusing on the numbers – the way it can create the sense that Scratch is some kind of popularity contest - seem to outweigh any small benefits in terms of finding good projects.

Anyhow - please keep the discussion going - because if there is something really important here we're not seeing, I definitely want to understand it better!

I really don't think the amount of followers someone has is connected to project quality at all. From my view, being the Scratcher with right around 20 followers, I've gotten a few followers off of a project that I thought was actually pretty bad! (Just to clarify, I made the project. )

you prob did that for a really good reason

Lightnin wrote:

Good to see so many people sharing opinions about this change!

However – with respect – some of these scenarios don't really ring true to me. Are there really so many 10,000 follower Scratchers that you need to be able to differentiate them from Scratchers with 10 followers? I wasn't aware there were so many Scratchers with quite so many followers.

I can definitely see reasons to push back on this change. Even though it's relatively small, it does affect something you (we) all care about, and something you interact with every day. I'd like to understand the concerns about it better. Some have said that having the follower count immediately visible allows people to make a short hand judgement about the likely quality of the projects. They then use that judgement to decide whether to invest the 30 seconds or so that it takes to click on the projects and check them out.

But how do you come to that profile in the first place? Isn't whatever gets you to that profile page more important / more likely to influence your decision about whether or not to view the projects on it than the follower count? We don't allow people to search by numbers of followers - so there must be some other way you are scanning profiles.

Finally I would ask - is follower count really that strongly correlated with project quality? I've seen some pretty amazing projects by folks with no followers - or very few. What about projects by people who don't generally participate socially on the site and have very few followers?

To conclude: I'm all for figuring out / talking about better ways to connect Scratchers to projects they find interesting. I guess I just don't see follower count as so crucial to that. And the negative aspects of focusing on the numbers – the way it can create the sense that Scratch is some kind of popularity contest - seem to outweigh any small benefits in terms of finding good projects.

Anyhow - please keep the discussion going - because if there is something really important here we're not seeing, I definitely want to understand it better!

Okay, let me address your post in all order.

1. 10 to 1000 would be a better thing to compare. 10000 was only used as an example because Speakvisually used it in the first place.

2. How I come to that profile in the first place? Perhaps the person commented on one of my projects… or their icon caught my eye, and I wanted to see if they made it themselves or not. But then I wonder if I should check how many followers they have so that I know if they're a good Scratcher or somebody who's taking random things for projects and claiming them for themselves.

Also, that is not the only use. If you read my first post in this thread, which you can locate on page 1, there are two more reasons why these counts should stay.

3. Yes, yes it is. Except for rare cases, good Scratchers usually have many followers. Paddle2see once said it like this: “Cream has a way of rising to the top” when asked about why a project that was really good couldn't be featured.

4. What about comments on profiles? There hardly any competition there. As I said in my first post, this was useful to me. Now you removed it. Really annoying!

You must really care about the Scratchers.

qeys wrote:

You must really care about the Scratchers.

That is kinda their job