Lots of talk lately about Twitter bots and how they degrade the Twitter experience. Other than an occasional housecleaning, Twitter rarely does anything about its bot problem. Popular thinking is that Twitter needs these fake accounts to raise its user numbers and thus, boost its valuation. The relative truthiness over Twitter’s botscape is also a sticking point in the on-again/off-again saga of the Elon/Twitter buyout.

Dawned on me a few days ago that if killing bots ever became important to Twitter, an easy way to get started would be to simply remove follower numbers from Twitter accounts. The world has put an outsized level of value on Twitter follower counts, which has led to an entire economy based on artificially inflating those numbers. Removing follower counts would make follow-inflation bots obsolete. It wouldn’t automatically erase these bots but it’d stop the propagation of new ones being made for this purpose.

Yeah, there’d still be SPAM bots, pr0n bots, and whatever-else bots. But it’d be a start.