James,

First of all, thanks for taking the time to respond. I by no means want to ‘crap on other writers’, as you put it, and by no means claim that I’m an expert.

You’re right, the article does only ascribe negative reasons for mass following of other writers, but only because I’ve never been presented with any of the positive reasons you discuss.

It’s you follow huge numbers of people and intend on engaging with them, fantastic. But can you honestly say that everyone has your intentions? This may be another assumption, but just as it happens on Instagram/Twitter, people DO follow others in the hope they’ll follow back.

If people are following the max amount of people per day, without any engagement, with the sole intention of gaining followers in return, that is what I disagree with. Those are the people that are using followers as a vanity metric, and they do exist, whether we like it or not.

As for my assumptions, you say I’m assuming why people should follow people. I think that the only reason to follow someone is that you enjoy their work and want to read more of it, do you disagree? Surely any other reason than that is purely for the sake of trying to gain an additional follower?

You say I assume that one of the reasons people do follow others is in hope they are followed back. This isn’t an assumption, this happens on every social platform. I’m not saying that everyone does this, but it’s a fact that it happens.

Look through your friend's list on Facebook, see how many people have hundreds, maybe even thousands of friends. Are you telling me that’s not for vanity’s sake? Facebook is a platform created for social interaction. I highly doubt that the people who have thousands of friends are interacting with them all on a regular basis. Again, another assumption, but we all know it’s true. I have around 300 Facebook friends, and that is too many, which is why I’m in the process of culling the ones that I no longer interact with.

Once again, thanks for reading.

Yours,

Jon