I'm a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having "only" ten thousand followers.

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 16 points 3 months ago

That's worrying. Imagine what things like that do to those poor children. I hope she can come up with the money to buy some more followers at least. /s

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

I remember hitting 1000 subscribers on YouTube. I'm still proud of that achievement.

[–] andioop@programming.dev 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

When I was in middle school, social media might have been omnipresent but even the really popular kids never exceeded 1,000 followers. In high school you could increase the upper limit on followers, but most people hovered around 250 to low 1,000s depending on their popularity. And I never heard anyone talk about their follower quantity, let alone insult people over it. I suppose this is my "kids these days" moment.

Then again, we all just had personal accounts for our friends to follow and weren't trying to be some big influencer or social media star—maybe that's what these kids are trying to do? Either way, I am really hoping what you overheard was just banter or an ironic joke between the two, and not legit bullying.