Meaningless Actions

There seems to be a large portion of the online population that tries to inject false obligations into the things you do in online communities.

For example, on YouTube, a lot of people will want you to subscribe to them if they subscribe to you.  This also happens on Twitter, people expect to be "followed back".

My problem with this is that it renders the feature completely useless, all in the name of inflating a number displayed on the user's profile.  YouTube's subscription feature allows you to easily see when the people you're subscribed to have uploaded new videos, or on occasion it recycles old videos and goes "oh lol this is new right?" so you have to go and clear them all out.  Twitter's following feature shows the tweets from the people you're following on your main page.

I guess nobody really wants these things to be meaningful.  I do though.  I only subscribe to people on YouTube whose videos I want to see on a regular basis.  The same for Twitter, I will only follow someone if I want to see their updates.  This is what the respective features were designed for, and nothing more.

Interestingly enough, YouTube has a separate "friends" feature, which is I guess what people are using subscriptions for, except that friending someone involves sending a request that they have to approve, and it doesn't inflate a number on your channel.