I don't like the current state of following people on social media. Following people is too much an act of friendship.
You should follow someone because you want to keep up with their content. Tumblr used to do this the best, you would follow someone, they would get notified, and that's the end. Nobody has a public following or follower count, so there is no incentive to try and get it as high as you can. Recently, they revamped thier notification system, and this introduced one of my least favorite parts of following people:
Mutual Culture
Being mututals means that you're following a person, and they follow you back, hence you're mutually following. This has been a thing for a long time. However, recently Tumblr officially implemented this. Now when you get a notification from one of your "mutuals", it will have a mutual badge on it:
Mutuals
Tumblr isn't the first site to have a feature like this. Almost every social networking service has something similar to this. Twitter has the Follows you badge, the Instagram follow button changes to Follow back when someone is following you, the TikTok follow button changes to Friends when users mutually follow each other, and so on.
Not only this, but platforms also let you restrict actions to only mututal followers, like commenting, posts, or tagging. Having controls isn't bad, but instead of just being mutual followers, you should be able to set specific people.
B-but!!
"But social media is social! It's in the name!" I understand this, and that's why I think a friend request system could be implemented separatally. The only problem is this would be kind of confusing. Newgrounds does this too, and it's confusing. Another thing that could be done, like I said earlier, was to use a list of people. Twitter used to do this good, with the introduction of Twitter Circles. It was a really populaer feature, and it was so loved that Elon removed it.
Private accounts are also a good way to do this, however, as an anti-social person, I get scared requesting access unless the other person tells me to beforehand.
Solutions
These aren't really well thought out, but this is a microblog rant, I don't know what you were expecting.
- Friend Request System
- Option to disable indication of someone following you
- Approval lists
- Going outside