Several people have argued that Twitter should remove the follower counts from their user profiles. Showing that number gives it undeserved attention and stimulates people to get more and more followers instead of focusing on content and relationships.
I don’t necessarily agree but I do think this is an interesting discussion.
Of course you can’t really delete the follower count from your profile and the changes are slim that Twitter will ever do it for you. Now Christine Lu (9422 Followers) has come up with an simple and elegant trick to hide her follower count, and almost all the other info in the sidebar too.
Simply make your sidebar text color the same as your sidebar background color and everything will be unreadable. Check it out:
Having no readable text there certainly sets you apart from the rest of the pack. Unfortunately your description becomes ineligible too. The URL is still readable so you better make that as descriptive as possible if you should decide to go for this trick.
Don’t want to poop on your genius strategy but…
select the text? a.k.a. ctrl-A..
It’s not what we call monkey proof
To read the counter and text, you just need to highlight it and it will turn to the opposite color, white. So if you really want to read it, you can.
hey guys,
it’s a total scotch tape job. i.e. yes, i realize that you can highlight the text and still see it. you can also hover over it and it’ll show you like that.
but i just wanted it out of plain view for a change.
all my tweets are still readable so it’s not like i’ve “protected my updates” :)
cheers, christine
Haven’t tried this yet, but what if you make the sidebar background and the text the same color as it will be when highlighted (light blue)? Then you’d really have to copy-paste the text or view the page source to read the follower count :-)
all you really need to do is highlight it and it will show right through.
Hiding the follower count is important for businesses who want to communicate via twitter with their customers, but not let those customers communicate with each other (ie give access to your competition to approach your hard earned client base).
follow me on twitter @916divadoll
Hardly elegant!
And I never said it was. I said it is a simple and elegant trick to hide her follower count. Is is hidden from sight but not gone. :-)
where do you go to hide the followers??????????????/