Shower Thoughts

I've been thinking about how we use the number of followers to infer a sense of "worth" about a user, and it even goes as far as affecting the perceived quality of their posts.
I think it's interesting that in the era of forums the stats we had by a user's post was: signup date, last online, number of posts, and maybe reputation if the forum had that system.

I'm not sure if either one is better than the other, but I'm curious what things would look like if we continued down that path and never got into the obsession around followers.