• combat_brandonism [they/them]
    ·
    28 days ago

    But at no point is that set of numbers not absurd.

    Again, why tho. Neither you nor OP have made that point.

    • Speaker [e/em/eir]
      ·
      edit-2
      28 days ago

      1.5 billion people speak English.

      3 million people, each with 250k followers, amounts to a total of 750 billion follows. If every individual English speaker on the planet is in the pool of possible subscribers, then on average each one follows 750 billion / 1.5 billion = 500 of these large influencers. If you limit to only the population of the US, you're talking 750 billion follows distributed among 350 million people, which is about 2150 influencers followed per person.

      Unless there's some Followers Georg out there juicing the numbers really hard, these numbers are nonsensical. In your question, these are the 250k individuals each following the same 3 million influencers.

      • Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        edit-2
        27 days ago

        500 "influencers" followed per person isn't that extreme? Like, if you counted up your YouTube subscriptions, Twitch follows, TikTok follows, Facebook pages, Xitter follows, Instagram follows, Patreon follows, etc., I think plenty of people could beat 500. Hell, I barely use social media and I'm probs around there

        • Speaker [e/em/eir]
          ·
          edit-2
          27 days ago

          The absurd part isn't the 500 at that extreme, it's the 1.5 billion people required to make that number happen for 3 million people who claim to have over 250k followers. It's not "follow any 500 people", it's "follow 500 of these specific people".

    • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      28 days ago

      You have two maximums/minimums possible with the given data:

      250thousand followers are following 3.3 million content creators each

      Or

      (3.3million x 250thousand) followers each follow 1 content creator

      The last one is more than the total number of English speakers, by far, in the world.

      There is no inflection point on this linear regression. So, if neither extreme is sensible, it would be astonishing if some value between was.

      If you take the number of English speakers and divide it by 2 (so assuming half of all English speaking people are contributing to this phenomenon), then they are each, on average, following 1200 content creators.

      Following 1200 people is hard, even when they are people you know. This is nonsense

      I'm not gonna point at every point on the line, but you can just try any amount you think.

      There are also, of course, combinations of different amount of followers. Where 1 person makes up for 4 by following 4,600, but the number is so absurdly large that it can really only be accounted for by bots or lying, or a combo