Introduction
Unless you are an established rockstar from another social media platform, you usually won't have an audience waiting for you when you first join Steemit. And, since other people must see your content within 7 days in order to vote on it, you are forced into finding ways to build that audience if you hope to be successful.
So, the recommended advice seems to be to follow a lot of people and pray that they follow you back. When you have followers, your content will begin to appear in their feeds. This helps to improve discovery, and upvotes will hopefully trail close behind.
What this also leads to, though, is a lot of artificial follows. And, your own feed becomes filled with content that, frankly, you don't care about. Combine this with the fact that newcomers tend to post a lot of weak content while trying to see what sticks, and your feed becomes nearly worthless.
Or, at least that has been my experience since joining.
Now, I'm not suggesting that follow-for-follow is not a valid tactic to help Minnows get started. It is certainly better than nothing as an attempt to grow your audience. But, at a certain point, people should prune their following list to a healthier level just so that the Steemit home page isn't just a wall of meaningless content.
A Metric
I've been thinking about a metric that can be applied to accounts that would give some sort of indication of the quality of that account: a Follower-to-Following ratio.
You can use that to evaluate whether someone is popular or respected (more followers than following), or whether they are just trying to game the system (significantly more following than followers). You can also use that metric on yourself to know when your following list needs some maintenance.
We've seen this implemented [unofficially] on other platforms before. Real-life friends of mine created one on Twitter called the "TFFRatio" (which is now defunct). It was a simple bot that would reply to its own mentions with a calculation of how many followers the user has vs how many friends.
Their scale was linear:
What is your TFF Ratio?
Your TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio) is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). The higher the ratio, the more Twitter heat you pack.
- A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return. Check your pulse, you might be a bot.
- A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Many people think that a ratio of around 1.0 is the best - you're listening and being listened to.
- A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what you have to say. You might be a thought leader in your community.
- A TFF Ratio 10 or higher indicates that you're either a Rock Star in your field or you are an elitist and you cannot be bothered by Twitter's mindless chatter. You like to hear yourself talk. Luckily others like to hear you talk, too. You may be an ass.
Steemit has the same social concept as Twitter: you follow people to read their stuff, and people follow you to read your stuff. There's some sort of meaningful metric when the two numbers are compared to one another.
At first, I thought that the simple ratio would be the most useful (matching what the TFF Ratio did for Twitter):
[Number of people who follow you] ÷ [Number of people who you follow]
This way, if someone managed to get 100 followers by following 100,000 other accounts, then their ratio would be very low (1:1000, or 0.001). In other words, you would be punished for following way more people than who follow you back.
But, by the same token, if the goal is to increase the size of your audience, then being Resteemed by somebody with 2000 followers is attractive even if that person is following 20,000 other accounts (1:10 ratio, or 0.1) because you have the chance to reach up to 2000 more people.
Since Followers has more weight than Following, I came up with the following formula instead:
log(Followers * Followers / Following)
This leads to some interesting combinations that still penalizes for haphazardly following too many people, but not as severely if that tactic happens to work out:
Using the Metric
Let's suppose that a healthy number to strive for is 2.0 or higher. You can get there with follow-for-follow by following 100 people (and having them follow you back). Or, if you have 50 followers already, then you can reduce your following count to 25 and still result in a score of 2.0.
But, following a lot of people without them reciprocating will work against you.
For example, if following 500 people has resulted in 278 followers, then your score would be a healthy 2.19. But, following 2000 people to get the same 278 followers will result in an unhealthy score of 1.59 (indicating that you should perform some maintenance on your following list).
Because of the use of the Log() function, the resulting score can be compared to a follow-for-follow:
1.0 would be the same as a 10-person mutual follow
2.0 would be the same as a 100-person mutual follow
3.0 would be the same as a 1000-person mutual follow
4.0 would be the same as a 10000-person mutual follow
etc.
Of course, this is just one metric that must be weighed against other metrics, such as Reputation and Steem Power, to be used effectively. But, it does provide a sense of an account's social health.
Let's look at the FFR for some accounts as an example:
| Who | Rep | Followers | Following | FFR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 68.8 | 4810 | 3 | 6.9 |
 | 66.2 | 6673 | 6021 | 3.9 |
 | 77.9 | 2842 | 48 | 5.2 |
 | 75.6 | 6731 | 6514 | 3.8 |
 | 75.0 | 4746 | 1548 | 4.2 |
 | 71.7 | 5670 | 3441 | 3.9 |
 | 54.1 | 296 | 241 | 2.6 |
 | 42.1 | 2011 | 13530 | 2.5 |
 | 44.2 | 1454 | 27297 | 1.9 |
Any Thoughts?
Do you think that FFR would be a useful metric that could be used to make informed decisions about who to follow, or indicate when you should perform maintenance on your own Following list? Or, am I just overthinking ways to try to qualify people based on data alone?