If Twitter put me on the Suggested Users List,... - Dave Winer

Same goes for me! - Matthew DeVries

Not Me! I'd celebrate, strip naked, and howl at the Moon! - ZuDfunck

Why would you do that? - Angsuman Chakraborty

I would announce it to all my friends and family and then probably delete it , I don't need the pressure - Kim Landwehr

It would be a disaster if I got on the SUL. I already spend too much time screening new followers. - Morton Fox

I've never clamored for followers and don't understand why people do so. - Derrick

Question: If FriendFeed had a SUL; and you were on it, would you say the same thing if you started getting more subscribers? - I sense bias. - Sociosophy Reviews

I agree with @sociosophy, this double standard about griping about Twitter's list and not about Friendfeed's is ridiculous. Can't we all just move on, I'm sure there are better things to be discussed. - Brandon Mendelson

The FF SUL is not hand picked... it's done based on who are FoaF and are popular - Chris Heath

Here's the deal -- number of followers on Twitter is a totally different thing from the number on FF. When you click on a name in Twitter there is the number of followers, in big type. They bury the number of followers in FF. I don't know how many I have and I don't want to know. I also don't know how many you have or Scoble has. But on Twitter it's almost as prominent as their name. So it matters. You can say it doesn't for you, but it does for almost everyone else. - Dave Winer

Hence my question, Chris. If FF had a hand-picked SUL, I doubt the discussion would be the same. Additionally, I agree with Brandon - there's plenty more crap to gripe about, like the bad styling choices made for FF with this new launch. - Sociosophy Reviews

I love it!!! I think that is the very thing that is diluting twitter.. Good call Dave. - Drew Lucas

But it got gamed in a bad way on Twitter, openly, and now you have this strange thing where it matters, the numbers are quoted, people write stories about them, and they are often meaningless. My numbers actually kind of mean something, I say kind of because in comparison with those of others you have to ask whether the other guy is on The List or not. - Dave Winer

Ryo, I hear you, but it seems to me that Twitter has reached it's breaking point, jumped the shark, whatever you want to call it. I know when I see people who claim to be social media experts, or follow or are followed by 10K people, it's a big turn off and I can't block them fast enough. If I was in the market to do something via social media, I'd look for something post-Twitter to help me get my message out. - Derrick

That and on a personal level -- I really resent that other people get special treatment and even more it rubs our nose in the fact that there are *three* levels in Twitter: 1. Peons. 2. Special People. and 3. Gods. The gods not only are special, but they have the power to annoint people as special. I liked the web because it was a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. That's what I want to go back to now. I think the plantation model has run its course. - Dave Winer

One more thing -- I don't think FF is any better. We have to get out of this mode where we're test cases in an ant farm owned by these programmer types. I don't like this new UI and if this were part of the web, I could ignore it. I'm going back to the web -- this is ridiculous. I've learned all I'm going to learn from these systems. They suck. Moral of the story. - Dave Winer

We have to remember that this is only mirroring real life. Whether we like it or not, there are class systems in the entire world, and that certainly includes the United States. Those who are rich, seem excessively rich. Actors, football players, and others get paid insane amounts of money for jobs that really aren't that much harder than any other. There are people with billions of dollars, while high-end senior level positions in technology barely break $150k, and people who have three blue collar jobs are still only $45k/year. Let's face it, the Internet is really only a mirror of the real world, whether we like it or not. Why should social media be any different? It's certainly corrupt as hell. - Kevin Elliott

Dave I completely agree. The new UI is stark and bold and lacks any nuance. I call it 'early BlogSpot'. I miss the dialogue bubble and the source app icon. If they leave the old real-time pop-out URL intact I won't care. - Gregg Scott

Kevin, of course -- but -- they can change anything they want with blogspot or wordpress.com and I can go on editing Scripting News as always cause it's on my own domain and I control the software there. I'm talking pragmatics. And if Twitter gave a reporter 500K free followers on Twitter, I might stop trusting what that reporter says about Twitter. And in general I might wonder if people were withholding criticism in the hope that they might someday get that favor. Yes this is how the world works. I like the fact that the net subverts that. - Dave Winer

We should stop trusting that reporter now, since Twitter *is* essentially giving people hundreds of thousands of followers without merit already! I'm sorry, but Oprah getting 700k followers is ridiculous. - Kevin Elliott

Actually I don't completely agree. The UI I'm not craxy for. That's it. - Gregg Scott

Kevin, that's exactlly right. That's why I said they poisoned Twitter as a medium for news when they invented the SUL and I meant it and I believe it, and I think it's obvious. - Dave Winer

I will repeat it here: Twitter mass follows are the new Spam. It's making the noise louder. - William Mougayar