Everyone knows about followers. They are people who appreciate your work. They can also be your friends. They can also be bad. Followers are ALMOST like drugs. You get followers, and you are addicted. Before, when they were called friends, people thought of them as their online friends. Now that they are followers, lots of scratchers think they mean fame. It has caused lots of problems, such as spam and advertising, copying projects with no credit, and supporting what seems to be “good”, such as stopping the AE war and F4F for followers. Many otherwise innocent scratchers have been banned or left due to their follower hunger.


I have a simple solution to this. Remove the “followers” tab completely. Still include the tab showing who you are following, so you can check the people who you are fans of, but remove the follower tab completely, and make it invisible to the F12 mode by not even having it in the code. Why will this work? The people who complain about it, advertise, copy projects, and do F4F won't do it anymore!

This is ridiculous. Might as well remove following completely - then instead of follow for follow, you can love for love!
But because people with few loves will think that their projects are worse than others and people with top-loved stuff will start boasting about their projects, you could remove loving projects! Doesn't sound too far off from hiding views. According to you, I'm not even allowed to see how many people have taken a look at my project. As for subtracting them… that's just plain lying.
The remixing idea doesn't sound too bad.
Advertising can already be solved by reporting them. It's spam. Or do you want to remove commenting to prevent it in the first place?
Basically, most of this I don't support.

adasba wrote:

Everyone knows about followers. They are people who appreciate your work. They can also be your friends. They can also be bad. Followers are almost like drugs. You get followers, and you are addicted.

whoa whoa whoa hang on, you're comparing followers to drugs? I think you mean narcotics, but still, that's politically incorrect to compare to because it is not common for everyone. yeah I can agree people find it a little to “addictive” in a sense that they depend on it to stay on Scratch.

Before, when they were called friends, people thought of them as their online friends. Now that they are followers, lots of scratchers think they mean fame. It has caused lots of problems, such as spam and advertising, copying projects with no credit, and supporting what seems to be “good”, such as stopping the AE war and F4F for followers. Many otherwise innocent scratchers have been banned or left due to their follower hunger.

I don't think changing “friends” to “followers” has caused those issues - they have been happening since the dawn of Scratch. I get what you mean that the specific kind of spam and advertising (“follow me!!!!11!”) has risen but project copying and resistance to trends have always happened.

but I don't think you can assume “innocent” Scratchers were banned; they had to be guilty of something. however, what you said about people leaving because they aren't getting enough followers is true, and equally sad. sad because they prioritize their popularity before the learning experience.

I have a simple solution to this. Remove the “followers” tab completely. Still include the tab showing who you are following, so you can check the people who you are fans of, but remove the follower tab completely, and make it invisible to the F12 mode by not even having it in the code. If people use an external program to scan the entire scratch webpage to find people that have them in the “following” tab, and they start talking about how many followers they have, then they should get an alert.

actually I can see the benefits of this idea: less things to get per page means faster servers. however, intuition tells me once the followers row is gone, people are gonna shift focus to the following row and intensify “follow everyone” games, and some people will still find out by going to http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/users/username/followers/ . but I believe the pros outweigh the cons for now.

secondly, I don't think it should go to the extreme of sending alerts to users discussing about their followers.

There are lots of fame-related problems that will stay even if followers don't exist. There is copying, view hunger, and advertising. To stop copying, tags inside the .sb2 file will show a remix link. If the tags are removed using a program or by hand, the offline editor will not open the project and if uploaded, the user will be given an alert and the project will be removed. Sprites from the backpack will also have these tags, and they will turn into multiple links in the “Notes and Credits” section. Hand-assembling a copied project will also add a remix from a similarity checker, which won't care about extra scripts.

I believe there are project copy checkers in the works already, but they can't be perfect because there are so many ways to dissect a project and reassemble it elsewhere.

View hunger can be solved by deleting the view count, or muting people who do it. Another solution might be subtracting views if people complain.

views aren't all that important to the servers, so I don't see what problems will be solved by getting rid of them. there are so few people who actually care about views nowadays.

Advertising can be solved by deleting comments, or on other peoples profiles a “remove for advertising” button where ST members and moderators quickly remove them.

there is a big difference between advertising and spam

Zro716 wrote:

adasba wrote:

Everyone knows about followers. They are people who appreciate your work. They can also be your friends. They can also be bad. Followers are almost like drugs. You get followers, and you are addicted.

whoa whoa whoa hang on, you're comparing followers to drugs? I think you mean narcotics, but still, that's politically incorrect to compare to because it is not common for everyone. yeah I can agree people find it a little to “addictive” in a sense that they depend on it to stay on Scratch.

Before, when they were called friends, people thought of them as their online friends. Now that they are followers, lots of scratchers think they mean fame. It has caused lots of problems, such as spam and advertising, copying projects with no credit, and supporting what seems to be “good”, such as stopping the AE war and F4F for followers. Many otherwise innocent scratchers have been banned or left due to their follower hunger.

I don't think changing “friends” to “followers” has caused those issues - they have been happening since the dawn of Scratch. I get what you mean that the specific kind of spam and advertising (“follow me!!!!11!”) has risen but project copying and resistance to trends have always happened.

but I don't think you can assume “innocent” Scratchers were banned; they had to be guilty of something. however, what you said about people leaving because they aren't getting enough followers is true, and equally sad. sad because they prioritize their popularity before the learning experience.

I have a simple solution to this. Remove the “followers” tab completely. Still include the tab showing who you are following, so you can check the people who you are fans of, but remove the follower tab completely, and make it invisible to the F12 mode by not even having it in the code. If people use an external program to scan the entire scratch webpage to find people that have them in the “following” tab, and they start talking about how many followers they have, then they should get an alert.

actually I can see the benefits of this idea: less things to get per page means faster servers. however, intuition tells me once the followers row is gone, people are gonna shift focus to the following row and intensify “follow everyone” games, and some people will still find out by going to http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/users/username/followers/ . but I believe the pros outweigh the cons for now.

secondly, I don't think it should go to the extreme of sending alerts to users discussing about their followers.

There are lots of fame-related problems that will stay even if followers don't exist. There is copying, view hunger, and advertising. To stop copying, tags inside the .sb2 file will show a remix link. If the tags are removed using a program or by hand, the offline editor will not open the project and if uploaded, the user will be given an alert and the project will be removed. Sprites from the backpack will also have these tags, and they will turn into multiple links in the “Notes and Credits” section. Hand-assembling a copied project will also add a remix from a similarity checker, which won't care about extra scripts.

I believe there are project copy checkers in the works already, but they can't be perfect because there are so many ways to dissect a project and reassemble it elsewhere.

View hunger can be solved by deleting the view count, or muting people who do it. Another solution might be subtracting views if people complain.

views aren't all that important to the servers, so I don't see what problems will be solved by getting rid of them. there are so few people who actually care about views nowadays.

Advertising can be solved by deleting comments, or on other peoples profiles a “remove for advertising” button where ST members and moderators quickly remove them.

there is a big difference between advertising and spam

These are good ideas. I think the scratchers who did something bad from followers never would of done the bad things if there were no followers. Also, my idea of removing the followers bar was not to speed up the server (I just realized it did) but it was to stop people from going crazy about fame. Also, I think I should say that the followers page should be deleted as well. I think the alerts are a bit extreme but maybe it just tells them that scratch is not about fame but doesn't count towards a ban. I think most people won't go through a ton of trouble to program a tag remover or something, but the few people who do it will probably get banned if their projects get popular. I think the view thing is correct. I didn't think this through completely. I made a studio on this if you look at my profile. @Paddle2see commented there.

Prinseskat wrote:

This is ridiculous. Might as well remove following completely - then instead of follow for follow, you can love for love!
But because people with few loves will think that their projects are worse than others and people with top-loved stuff will start boasting about their projects, you could remove loving projects! Doesn't sound too far off from hiding views. According to you, I'm not even allowed to see how many people have taken a look at my project. As for subtracting them… that's just plain lying.
The remixing idea doesn't sound too bad.
Advertising can already be solved by reporting them. It's spam. Or do you want to remove commenting to prevent it in the first place?
Basically, most of this I don't support.

if following is removed completely, then people won't get to look at profiles they like as easily. Also, F4F doesn't harm scratch, and I don't think love for love or favorite for favorite will harm it either. Also, almost no one complains about low loves or favorites. Also, I rushed this post, and didn't think. It turns out view complaining isn't a big problem in scratch, so I think I should remove that part.

adasba wrote:

Also, F4F doesn't harm scratch

I thought you meant the opposite when you suggested removing the followers row?

Zro716 wrote:

adasba wrote:

Also, F4F doesn't harm scratch

I thought you meant the opposite when you suggested removing the followers row?

The row showing people following YOU and the page should be removed.

I don't really think you know what followers mean to people.

Followers aren't drugs. Not bad ones at least. If you get a follow, you like it. It's like having a compliment being given to you. Of course you'll want more. Now things can go two ways.

The first way is the F4F way.You do good things for others, in the condition that they do good things for you. Now this is annoying, but you can't really prove that it's bad. This can go as long as there are people to continue it.

If you think you can become famous like this however, think again. This is the second method of gaining followers. Check out all the famous Scratchers, griffpatch, theChAOTiC, scratchu8, etc. Did they ever accept a F4F? No. So why do they have so many followers? Because they make good projects. They deserve this stuff, and they deserve to have people know that thousands of Scratchers like this guy. They worked for every single follower they got, instead of that equivalent exchange “I scratch your back you scratch mine” junk.

So basically, fame is not followers 100% of the time. You can get as many followers as griffpatch but unless people actually care about your work no one will bother to view your projects. And since they're unrelated why remove the follower tab in the first place?

As for your third paragraph, there's no point of doing that. View hunger, advertising and copying are only a problem like 1% of the time I've ever been on Scratch. And all you have to do is press the back button, go away from the project and annoy the advertiser. If they're going to keep advertising then they're gonna have to take the risks of a devastating reply every time.

adasba wrote:

Everyone knows about followers. They are people who appreciate your work. They can also be your friends. They can also be bad. Followers are almost like drugs. You get followers, and you are addicted. Before, when they were called friends, people thought of them as their online friends. Now that they are followers, lots of scratchers think they mean fame. It has caused lots of problems, such as spam and advertising, copying projects with no credit, and supporting what seems to be “good”, such as stopping the AE war and F4F for followers. Many otherwise innocent scratchers have been banned or left due to their follower hunger.


I have a simple solution to this. Remove the “followers” tab completely. Still include the tab showing who you are following, so you can check the people who you are fans of, but remove the follower tab completely, and make it invisible to the F12 mode by not even having it in the code. If people use an external program to scan the entire scratch webpage to find people that have them in the “following” tab, and they start talking about how many followers they have, then they should get an alert.

There are lots of fame-related problems that will stay even if followers don't exist. There is copying, view hunger, and advertising. To stop copying, tags inside the .sb2 file will show a remix link. If the tags are removed using a program or by hand, the offline editor will not open the project and if uploaded, the user will be given an alert and the project will be removed. Sprites from the backpack will also have these tags, and they will turn into multiple links in the “Notes and Credits” section. Hand-assembling a copied project will also add a remix from a similarity checker, which won't care about extra scripts.

View hunger can be solved by deleting the view count, or muting people who do it. Another solution might be subtracting views if people complain.

Advertising can be solved by deleting comments, or on other peoples profiles a “remove for advertising” button where ST members and moderators quickly remove them.

Any Ideas? I will add them! I want feedback.

Paragraph one: Wrong after first line.
Paragraph two: No. The ST wouldn't let this fly.
Paragraph three: Removing views? That's just mean and dishonest. Muting? No.
Overall, bad idea. No one will support this. Certainly not my collab. -17
Next time, take longer thinking about an idea and the responses it will get before posting.

Alberknyis wrote:

I don't really think you know what followers mean to people.

He does not.

Alberknyis wrote:

If you get a follow, you like it. It's like having a compliment being given to you. Of course you'll want more. Now things can go two ways.

I can agree with that.

Alberknyis wrote:

The first way is the F4F way. You do good things for others, in the condition that they do good things for you. Now this is annoying, but you can't really prove that it's bad. This can go as long as there are people to continue it.

Yes. Followers gained like this aren't real admirers.

Alberknyis wrote:

This is the second method of gaining followers. Check out all the famous Scratchers, griffpatch, theChAOTiC, scratchu8, etc. Did they ever accept a F4F? No. So why do they have so many followers? Because they make good projects. They deserve this stuff, and they deserve to have people know that thousands of Scratchers like this guy. They worked for every single follower they got, instead of that equivalent exchange “I scratch your back you scratch mine” junk.

First of a all, it isn't junk. I dislike it,but it isn't junk. And I agree, fame is earned, not traded for.

Alberknyis wrote:

So basically, fame is not followers 100% of the time. You can get as many followers as griffpatch but unless people actually care about your work no one will bother to view your projects. And since they're unrelated why remove the follower tab in the first place?

Yep. People can also get fame by project favorites or views. And why should the view count and the favorite button be removed? It shouldn't. It has so many other constructive uses.

Alberknyis wrote:

As for your third paragraph, there's no point of doing that. View hunger, advertising and copying are only a problem like 1% of the time I've ever been on Scratch. And all you have to do is press the back button, go away from the project and annoy the advertiser. If they're going to keep advertising then they're gonna have to take the risks of a devastating reply every time.

lol yep.

There's such a push all the time for this idea that Scratch isn't about fame but at the end of the day that's really determined by how the community uses the website! Also, the only thing you listed as a “problem” caused by followers that's related at all is F4F which is really something that seems to occur on every website, of all time.

Actually, I kinda want the numbers on my profile back. Not everything removed..!!

Prinseskat wrote:

This is ridiculous. Might as well remove following completely - then instead of follow for follow, you can love for love!
But because people with few loves will think that their projects are worse than others and people with top-loved stuff will start boasting about their projects, you could remove loving projects! Doesn't sound too far off from hiding views. According to you, I'm not even allowed to see how many people have taken a look at my project. As for subtracting them… that's just plain lying.
The remixing idea doesn't sound too bad.
Advertising can already be solved by reporting them. It's spam. Or do you want to remove commenting to prevent it in the first place?
Basically, most of this I don't support.

here you go, to sum it all up, love, fav, and view counters are all things that contributes to “fame” not just followers

I decide to NOT support all of these ideas. Following is NOT like drugs. People can still be normal if they have a heart of griffpatch. Removing the followers count is like removing all of the following physiology.

Views are NOT an issue. They are supposed to be a checker of how many people viewed your projects. You can just ignore them. Copy checkers are NOT perfectly stable. Advertising and spam are NOT the same.

This should sum everything up.

I edited it so it only talks about the follower bar.

Scratchifier wrote:

Actually, I kinda want the numbers on my profile back. Not everything removed..!!

Me too.

Prinseskat wrote:

Scratchifier wrote:

Actually, I kinda want the numbers on my profile back. Not everything removed..!!

Me too.

This is for people who are fame-hungry.

adasba wrote:

Prinseskat wrote:

Scratchifier wrote:

Actually, I kinda want the numbers on my profile back. Not everything removed..!!

Me too.

This is for people who are fame-hungry.

why should it apply to everyone if you're only targeting a specific bunch?

Another point: what about -number of followers- specials, and thanking people for following you? Aren't you allowed to be grateful if someone likes your projects and wants to see more?

I personally wouldn't care if this happened tbh though I think that this might be a little overkill for the followers issue. My preference would be to remove the numbers even on the list page. Thoughts.

No support… if you leave, it's because you're not the kind of person who should be on scratch, anyway.