You Can Have Too Many Followers
One Rising Professional's Cautionary Tale
Imagine you’re at a party, where everybody’s happily nattering away. The guests tell each other stories and laugh a little too loudly. They kindly pretend to be interested in each other’s kids and do all the things you do at sweetly awkward human gatherings.
Now, suppose a guy shows up at the party with a megaphone, inserts himself into one of the circles of conversations, and begins to rant into the megaphone about how hard it was to find a parking spot on the street. At first, everybody tries to ignore him, although their gaze keeps skittering sideways to watch him as he bellows away. Some of them start nodding, because, well, come to think of it, parking is pretty terrible on this street. Others go over and start arguing with him—the parking’s worse a few blocks over, etc. Pretty soon, nobody’s talking about anything else except parking. And then somebody says they want to say something into the megaphone. The party falls apart as people stop conversing with each other and line up to use the megaphone. You head for the door and scuttle towards your car annoyed and appalled.
If you’ve ever read George Saunders, you might recognize this little parable from his 2007 book, The Brain-Dead Megaphone. Just this week, Ezra Klein had him on his podcast, and they discussed the megaphone as a metaphor for social media.
It's been a rough week for the billionaire who purchased one of the world’s loudest megaphones. Twitter’s had to lay off a lot of people and then tried to sell blue checks (and, for a while, gray ones), which somehow made it easy for scammers to do some serious damage. And, what with the 11,000 employees laid off by Meta, it’s beginning to feel like digital media aren’t so much a megaphone as a whoopee cushion.
But this isn’t a newsletter about the mistakes of billionaires. It’s a storytelling site about early-careerists and how they deal with digital overwhelm. So, let’s turn to Min Ki Kim, a grad student, studying media and strategic communication at Calvin University. He and I sat down for lunch this week, and here’s the megaphone story he had to tell.
Min Ki Kim
Min Ki is a venturesome sort of guy whose early career won him celebrity in South Korea as a dancer, a YouTuber, and a public speaker. The first time his publisher (Namgil Kim) suggested he write a book, he said, no, he just wasn’t cut out to be an author. But in 2019, Min Ki surprised himself by publishing The Freedom to Change Myself, which went on to sell more than 31,000 copies. I have a copy of the book on my shelf, although I won’t be able to read it until I learn to read Korean. It’s a handsome volume, full of photos and charming graphic designs.
Just about a week before the book’s first big promotional event, Min Ki and Namgil Kim ran into a celebrity influencer at a bookstore. She told them that she didn’t usually read much but that she had enjoyed Min Ki’s stories enormously. After asking for his autograph, she agreed to come to the promotional event. Min Ki was elated. She had some 500,000 followers, after all, and her celebrity endorsement would amplify his book far more than he could on his own.
The promotional went very well, mostly because Min Ki is a fun-loving speaker with a pleasing baritone and an impish sense of humor. He’s also a superbly kind person. I’ve seen him speak, and his combination of humor and kindness is irresistible. The crowd loved the talk, and Min Ki felt supremely happy to be at the microphone.
The top left photo shows the influencer (wearing a white coat over a black outfit) whose haters caused all the troubles. On the top right, the publicist, Namgil, hails the crowd that Min Ki himself addresses in the bottom photo.
But it was right about then that the megaphone went off. As Min Ki was greeting the crowd after the event, Namgil called him and urged him to look at his socials. A quick flip of his thumb, and Min Ki was taking in a hundred hate-filled messages on his Instagram account. Immediately concerned that this mess was spewing all over his 20,000 followers, Min Ki deleted the messages. But as fast as he deleted them, more showed up.
So, there he was, standing in the middle of an elated crowd, staring at his iPhone. It didn’t take long to figure out that all the troubles traced eventually to the bookstore woman, the influencer with half a million followers. Unbeknownst to them, she was hugely despised by a small but devoted sect of haters who had dedicated themselves to trolling her in every digital space possible. Including Min Ki’s Instagram account.
No problem, the hater said, just so long as Min Ki agreed to delete every photo related to the event.
Namgil quickly tracked down the cell number of one of the trolls and placed the call. He assured the guy that, whatever his problem with the influencer, Min Ki barely knew her. Namgil begged them to stop blasting the Instagram account and leave their book promotional alone. No problem, the hater said, just so long as Min Ki agreed to delete every photo related to the event. Min Ki was crestfallen. The digital dimension of the event had been as meaningful to him as the in-person interaction. But he felt he had no choice but to comply, even though this meant that, for many of his followers, it would be as if the book event had never happened. The haters said that if even a single post about the event returned to his account, they would be back.
I asked him if he felt anger. He said, no, he felt fear. “I've learned,” he said later, “that having a lot of followers isn't such a good thing.”
With this story of social media trolls in mind, let’s go back to that party we started with—back to the same people telling their sort of lame stories, making their benevolent jokes, asking their sweetly tentative questions. But this time, for no reason you can explain, the person you’re talking to puts the crook of his arm to his lips and starts making fart noises every time you say something. You try to smile, but he keeps making the noises. So you duck out of the conversation circle and head for the drinks table. Now, someone else starts making fart noises. And then a lot of someone elses—until the party decomposes into mock flatulence. You sidle to the door and scuttle to your car, and you feel just as bemused and bewildered as Min Ki does as he ponders the trolling presence of the social media haters.
I asked him if he felt anger. He said, no, he felt fear. “I've learned,” he said later, “that having a lot of followers isn't such a good thing.”
I first heard Min Ki’s tale in a small circle of friends, eight or nine people in a grad school cohort. Just a few weeks later, he told us about a new idea he had, to video-capture the untold stories of little-known employees. The organization he was proposing this for spent most of their time telling stories about their products, but Min Ki said with simple eloquence that they needed to tell more stories about people. I feel a little surge of hope as I think of his latest idea. He’s not avoiding the world of social media. He’s not ducking out of digital communication. But he’s directing it differently. It’s not a megaphone that he’s aiming at the world. It’s a listening ear.
Wow. I'm so sorry that happened to him!