Why the More Followers You Gain, the Thinner the Relationships Grow — the Trade-Off of Number and Quality

Introduction

The figures are climbing. Followers have grown, the range you reach has widened, the total volume of reactions has increased too.

And yet the response grows thinner. You cannot see each person’s face. You no longer know whom you are writing for. It feels as though, back when it was a few dozen people, there was a surer exchange.

On how to increase followers, information is plentiful. What this article treats is the part that is its ground: why, as the number grows, the substance of the relationship thins — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because the quality and the number of relationships are in a trade-off, and only the increase of number is made visible.

The Number You Can Maintain Has a Ceiling

First, let me confirm from an immovable fact.

By the research of the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, there is a ceiling on the number of social relationships a human being can stably maintain. Dunbar estimated it at about 150 [Dunbar, 1992]. Not the mere number of acquaintances, but the number of relationships in which you grasp each other’s situation to some degree and can maintain trust.

Beyond this number, maintaining an individual relationship with every counterpart becomes physically impossible.

Yet the one who approaches seeking the sense of “there is an individual relationship” does not let go of that expectation. They keep minding whether you remember them, whether you answer their reactions.

Maintaining an individual relationship with each of hundreds, thousands, is impossible. And still, a period of trying to answer that impossible continues, and before long reaches its limit.

Or you try to cope by making a mechanism to maintain the appearance of “an individual relationship.” Auto-replies, templated responses, delegation. These can create the outward form of “an individual relationship” but cannot create its substance. The other eventually senses whether they are truly “being seen” or “being processed within a mechanism.”

The Trade-Off Is Made Visible on One Side Only

Here is an easily overlooked asymmetry.

A deep relationship with 100 people and a shallow relationship with 10,000 hold wholly different meanings. In the former, true dialogue arises on the basis of understanding each other’s situation. In the latter, there is only one-directional provision of information, and the receiver stays a consumer of it.

And what is decisive is that the expansion of number is easily made visible and functions as an “index of success,” whereas the lowering of the relationship’s quality is hard to see.

The figure keeps climbing while the substance of the relationship keeps thinning. In this process, the sense each person felt — “here is my place of belonging” — is lost. That loss does not appear in the figures.

What the discourse “increase your followers” chases is this latter expansion. It keeps recommending, without touching the structural ceiling, only the expansion of the figure.

The Follower Quietly Slides

Apart from the problem of number, a change occurs in the very nature of the relationship.

Between “follower” and “believer” there seems, at first glance, a great distance. But seen structurally, the two have a continuity.

Note that “believer” here carries no religious meaning. It is a social-psychological metaphor for a state of accepting the words of an authority without critical examination, of entrusting autonomous judgement to an external authority.

The path by which a follower becomes a believer is not an abrupt change. It is a gentle slope.

At first you follow as “a means of gathering information.” Next a trust forms — “this person’s way of seeing is a useful reference.” And the moment you cross a single step into “if this person says it, it is right,” the follower begins to head toward the believer.

What accelerates this slope is a closed place. Belong to a group that trusts the same counterpart, and within it exchanges that reinforce trust are carried on daily. The principle of “social proof” shown by the psychologist Robert Cialdini works [Cialdini, 2007]. People are apt to judge as right what many people think is right.

As a result, a design that gathers followers, whether intended or not, holds a pull in the direction of turning followers into believers. This is not a problem of the operator’s ethics but a problem of design.

Chasing Number Deepens Platform Dependence

There is one more layer that is hard to see.

Follower count, engagement rate, reach by algorithm — these indices are defined by the platform. Both the transmitting side and the receiving side try to maintain the relationship by optimising for the platform’s logic.

This optimisation deepens dependence on the platform. Change the algorithm, and the relationship is affected at once.

What works here is “the fixing of switching cost.” One who has piled up tens of thousands of followers is placed in a state where “the cost of leaving this platform is high.” A move to another medium means rebuilding the relationships from scratch.

The more you chase number, the less you can move from the place where that figure sits. This is another price the expansion of number holds.

The Difference from “a Route You Own”

So what should be done?

The key is where the relationship sits.

A relationship with followers on a platform is mediated by the platform. The algorithm decides where it delivers, and a change of specification alters the relationship.

Meanwhile, when you hold a route you manage — your own list, your own place of transmission that you own — the relationship of delivering your observations there is not swayed by the platform’s logic. What you wrote reaches, directly, the counterpart you decided.

This difference is not merely a difference of means. It is the difference between “a relationship dependent on a platform” and “a relationship you own.”

And when you hold a place to offer your observations continuously, a magnetic field is born that naturally draws counterparts who hold a worldview in the same direction. Because the distinctiveness “this person sees it this way” calls forth resonance.

Conclusion: Not the Number, but a Relationship Where Thinking Moves

That the more followers you gain the thinner the relationships grow was neither because the quality of transmission fell nor because your effort was short. It is because the number of relationships you can maintain has a structural ceiling, and expand beyond it and the quality necessarily thins.

And a thinned relationship is no substitute for “a deep relationship.” Rather, the more the number grows, the less the critical viewpoint reaches, and your ideas close off unverified.

So what to ask is not the number. It is whether, in that relationship, your thinking is moving.

Being surrounded by tens of thousands while no one argues back is, in a sense, lonelier than exchanging deeply with a few.

The value of holding a single ally may, in the long run, be greater than the value of holding a thousand followers. Because one year of dialogue with one person can update thinking more than all the reactions received from a thousand.

This is not a countermeasure to the move that chases number. It is a transformation toward the direction of making deep relationships carefully. The whole of this design is gathered in why the more you connect, the lonelier you grow.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Dunbar, R. I. M. “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates” (1992) Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6)
• Cialdini, R. B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2007)
• Weber, M. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921)