Aaron, this is a valid point.

There has to be a quantity measure in any consideration of social. If you have 10 quality contacts, you might not have the reach to get their interest, or dissappear in their feed.  With 1000 medium quaility contacts you have more of a chance of someone they know retweeting etc. 

The fact that 740 poeple have taken the time to subscribe to your blog via RSS is a great measure of how much they value your content. 

What gets me is when it is the ONLY focus.  Quality needs to be there too. If that restaurant was half full with sweaty drunk homeless people you’d never enter.

If Jamie Oliver – or someone who’s opinion you trust is sipping coffee in the corner, you’re going to dive in.
 

I suspect that you offer good quality content so I just subscribed to your blog I look forward to more articles

You’re right, there is no metrics than quantifies them, perhaps that is one reason why we’re all focus on the quantity instead? (then again, perhaps that is Klout is doing?)

Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.

Any further details from Reddit? There is actually a post about it from a blog. I took the video from the blog.

From what I learned, its quite common for startups/forums/sites to do these to make it seem alive so that others will join. @adam_pedley actually mentioned reading somewhere that quora did something similar.

Ahh, the great Quality vs. Quantity debate – the social media equivalent of nature vs nurture. You make a great point and I agree with you wholeheartedly. In an attention deprived social culture, we need quick cues to measure someone’s importance, and on average and when strapped for time, follower count, likes, and Klout score is an accurate indicator. Ultimately, I believe that having both is the ultimate goal.

This debate reminds me a lot about a debate I often hear in music. What makes a music artist good, sales or “talent.” Aficiondos are quick to point out that sales don’t mean that the artist is good – that it’s all about how good their music is and how little they “sell out.” This is this the quality argument. On the quantity side of things, we have artists who sell millions and are getting constant airplay. To a non-fan, that artist seems to be the “best” because of their constant exposure. However, that too takes skill – networking, promotion, connections, etc. Ultimately, the very best artists, Jay-Z, Michael Jackson, Rolling Stones, Beatles, all had a combination of promotion ability to build the quantity, and the quality of music to back it all up.

The ultimate advice is to focus on quality AND quantity, creating meaningful connections with your audience but also being aware of your visibility and promotion. Just my two cents.

“That made the site seemed more alive and not like a ghost town like Google+ ”

Oh Aaron, you need to use Google+ some more… there are plenty of amazing people and groups on G+. It’s just not mainstream – which is a good thing.

LoL! I know, actually that post was one of my most active post. Had a great number of great discussions there. it doesn’t look like what it seemed

Thanks for the post, Aaron!

We judge just about everything based on what we’d like ourselves to have. We’d love to have 100,000 highly engaged followers so we assume others with 100,000 followers must be doing something right. (At least I do).

This is so true in so many other areas of life, as well: The thinnest person isn’t necessarily the healthiest. The person with the appearance of wealth isn’t necessarily the most liquid.

I need to remind myself almost daily that the number of Twitter followers or blog readers isn’t nearly as important as the conversations that happen because I spent some time and focused on the few that I have.

As you hinted at in your post, quality is a long-term strategy.