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Same. All the babies saying they "have" to stay there because of their ostensibly huge audiences all... had fewer followers than me.

I had an unreasonably large following for some bizarre reason and it was quite a wrench to leave, but I couldn't stomach providing Elon with my shitty jokes for free. I ended up tripling my following here. I really think a lot of the twitter people who left BS just never figured out how to use it.

I didn't have a huge following by comparison (~10k when I left), but it was important for my career. I have the kind of job where they ask how many followers you have in interviews. Having none can be disqualifying. If the moral decision were always the easy decision, we'd live in a different world

I get it — I have worked in DevRel for as long as the field has existed. But part of what I've done for a lot of folks is helped them create platforms that they can answer that question with, because *nobody* owns their followers anyway. We know they arbitrarily hurt people's reach.

So it's vital to have a career strategy that is resilient to these things, especially as devrel itself has been devalued and undermined in the LLM era of coding.

Agreed. I've instead focused on the real value DevRel brings through content, engagement, etc. over vanity metrics of retweets/likes. Truth is that those never had much value—I'd have stuff heavily retweeted but very few clicked the link. If a company finds that disqualifying, I'm ok with that.