"Don't you know who I am? Do you know how many followers I have?"

A weird thing happened when I joined Figma. I ended up getting a lot¹ of followers on Twitter. Prior to my time there I had around 100 followers, and was mostly shitposting to empty air. I now have 6.9k followers (huge, I know - you must be very impressed), but admittedly almost all of this is just because of my position at Figma. Regardless of the reason, at some point I started tracking this number and placing arbitrary value on it. I'd find myself at cons being like, "wow this dude has 50k followers, they must be important".

At some point though I saw a "ranking" of a user with around 100k followers - they were ranked something like #150,000. In other words, there were 149,999 people on just Twitter with more followers than them. Put another way, the number of Tweeters² more popular than them was more than the population of Reykjavik. This was way more than I was expecting - they were a nobody in the grand scheme of the internet popularity contest.

I needed to know³ how much of a nobody I was. What municipality represented the number of people more popular than me? So I built this "do you know who I am?" calculator.

What I've learned from building this is that so many people are micro-famous today. There are so many small niches out there, and in the land where everyone is internet-famous, nobody really is. I've gone back to not worrying or carrying about my follower count. It's freeing in a way.

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