Techcrunch: Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma
Posted by on under film fight club, project mayhem, twitter, core idea, unfair advantage, main goal, follower, fight club, followers, fairness, dilemma, cares, ace, stern, lt, pers, credit card | 
In the film Fight Club (the book has a slightly different plot), the members of Project Mayhem's main goal is to blow up the buildings that contain credit card companies' records so that everyone's debt is reset to zero. (Yes, I know this wouldn't actually work, but never mind that for now.) Yesterday, two Twitter users, Allen Stern and Louis Gray, proposed the same idea for Twitter. That is to say, with the new suggested users list (SUL) now in place, they'd like to see Twitter reset the follower counts of users (either just those that have been on the SUL in the past, or everyone) to zero, and start over. The core idea behind this is that anyone on the SUL leading up to the change has gotten an unfair advantage in terms of the number of followers they now have on Twitter. Leaving aside the fairness of it, it certainly is true that just about every person with over a million followers on the service only got that many because of the SUL. And while you may wonder why anyone cares about the number of followers they have, for some accounts, such as those tied to blogs, a huge number of followers is beneficial in terms of clicks coming into the site when links are tweeted out. TechCrunch has certainly benefitted from this, as have a number of other large blogs on the SUL.Tagi: film fight club, project mayhem, twitter, core idea, unfair advantage, main goal, follower, fight club, followers, fairness, dilemma, cares, ace, stern, lt, pers, credit card