How can it be an influence economy if the currency is the number of followers and the number of followers does not show how many people are, in fact, following?

Maybe it’s because I have been running a z-list blog for a decade and a half, but I just don’t get the obsession with the number of twitter followers that drives this bot-driven fake influence economy.

A lot of followers doesn’t mean you’re any good at what you do. It would only mean that yours posts have spread to a lot of other people, except it doesn’t even mean that in a landscape where so many followers are fake. So why does it matter at all?