A bit of story time, first.
I was looking through my newsfeed one day, when I noticed one of my friends had been tagged in this... peculiar book, named something along the lines of "50 free follows".

Out of curiosity, I clicked on it to see what it was all about. And, well, the title pretty much explains the purpose of the book. Get a boost of 50 followers for your account, for a specific cost, mainly following certain people and voting on their books, and similar things. The book owner would then use about 50 alternate accounts to follow your account, essentially giving you 50 free followers.

I guess you can tell the problem I have with this.

Now, at first, I simply passed it off as this practice being something new. Something that one user suddenly came up with to just earn free follows, votes, whatever.
So at first, I didn't think much of it. I figured the Wattpad staff would deal with that later. After all, surely they wouldn't allow this kind of practice in their platform, right?

...Then I looked up "free follows" on Wattpad's browse tab.

There are many.

Get 15 more followers, get 20, get 50, get 100, get 300... And apparently there's one that promises to give you a boost of 1600 followers.

Fucking 1.6K followers right off the bat.

So now, whenever I see someone with a high amount of followers, not only do I think "Gee, I wonder how many of those followers are there just because they wanted to be followed back?", or "I wonder how many of those are following just for some dumb, lazy random book?"
Now to add to all that, I begin to wonder "Gee, I wonder how many of those followers are the exact same fucking person using multiple accounts?"

But to be honest, there's always one thing I always wonder, when seeing stuff like this.

Why?

Why do people do this?

What's the goddamn point?

What do you think you will achieve with this?

Do you realize your follower count is nothing but a hollow number by that point?

Followers are people.
They're not just numbers, they're not currency that you can just exchange, they're not your score in a videogame that you can just brag about...

No. They're people. They're supposed to be people who are legitimately interested in what you create, be it a story, a roleplay, some little project, etc.

But I guess that's not how Wattpad works. Nah, it's all about those followers and votes. Nevermind the passion, the effort, the dedication and the quality of someone's work. Nope, all of that is worthless. If you don't have many followers and votes, you aren't worth it.

Now, you might be thinking... Who am I to complain about this? Don't I have like 200 followers, and my works aren't even that good, or they're mostly side projects, art and character dumps and roleplays on hiatus?

And to be honest, you would be right to think that.

Why the fuck do I have 200 followers? Where did those even come from?

Let's be honest, about 20 or 30 of those followers actually give a rat's ass about what I create. So, what about the rest?

The answer is simple. I used the follow-for-follow method back then. Only a while ago I decided to undo that, and unfollow everyone I followed for that purpose, only following the people I actually gave a shit about, expecting the rest to fuck off and unfollow me, leaving me with the few followers that are actually followers.

But guess what? They didn't! Because they don't give a shit about what I post in the first place!
I made a clear announcement regarding this on my main feed, and they didn't even bother reading it! They didn't even bother checking if I unfollowed them or not! Because they simply don't give a shit!

Why did you follow me in the first place if you couldn't even bother to read a single announcement?!

Just unfollow me already if you don't even care about what I post! I'd rather have 20 true followers who actually care about my work, than 200 hollow shells of people, that just want to be followed back in return.

The fact that people use someone's follower count to determine if they are good or not, considering followers are worth ᵗʰᶦˢ much to the point that people can just give them away, is disgusting, frustrating, and infuriating to me.

I just don't get it.

I don't get the point.

PS: Congratulations! If you gave enough of a damn to get this far into this chapter, here's a video to go with it. Most of the reasoning behind this video can easily be applied to Wattpad and followers in general. I recommend the author as well, EmpLemon. He's a great YouTuber overall.

https://youtu.be/dJTLdpunhR0