Every other day I get a new random follower. Usually someone who has 7 sales, 2 followers and is following 2000 other authors across the marketplaces. I’m positive they select authors based purely on how many sales they have, not what they produce.
This person is not interested in my portfolio or new music, they want their avatar on display in as many places as possible. It’s a guess but I’m pretty sure that most of the time this is what’s happening.
There’s nothing harmful about this, it’s just pointless.
Previously we had on display our followers and those we followed. Many of us were selective about who we followed and which avatars were visible on our home page. We couldn’t do much about who followed us, but we could advertise nine other authors we were fans of.
It was useful for discovering new music, and getting a sense of each author’s tastes. (As well as promoting the work of those we liked).
Currently we are presented with a bunch of followers’ avatars on each author’s page. This tells us nothing other than which authors have signed up to follow us.
Wouldn’t it be better to present, as the default, a list of authors the owner of the home page is following? It would be more meaningful to gauge the taste of each author, and steer traffic towards those people whose work is of interest to the author, not just a bunch of random people who have followed them (and hundreds of others).
It would have the added benefit of providing an easy shortcut to the homepages of authors we are interested in. Given we can’t jump there from the forums anymore by clicking avatars it would be a handy feature to implement.
I know we can click to see which people individual authors follow, but it’s not the default mode and I would argue it should be.
