Follower counts seem like an obvious thing to put on a social profile. At a glance, they give you a signal of how popular an account is. And I think they do that job pretty well.

But popularity doesn't necessarily equal quality.

Follower counts are also a number people inevitably start chasing. They encourage comparison and can make posting feel more like a performance than something you do because you enjoy it.

Comparison is the thief of joy, or however the saying goes.

So I've made the somewhat bold decision not to show follower or following counts on Craftsky profiles.

The problem is that those numbers do provide some useful information. If I remove them, I think I need to replace them with signals that help answer a much more important question:

"Will following this person make my feed better?"

You can obviously look through someone's previous posts to decide that for yourself. But that takes time, and a profile "grid" doesn't immediately tell you things like how frequently someone posts.

So, for now, I've settled on three stats:

Account age

This gives you a little context about how established an account is. It isn't a measure of quality — someone who joined yesterday could be an incredible crafter — but it can still be a useful signal.

Posts in the last 7 days

Rather than showing a huge lifetime post count, this gives you a quick idea of how active someone currently is and roughly how often they're going to appear in your feed.

Total project count

This one is slightly different. It's partly useful to someone viewing the profile, but I also like it as a number for the account owner to watch grow. I'd much rather encourage people to think, "I've made 50 things!" than "I've reached 5,000 followers."

None of these stats tell you whether an account is "good", and that's intentional.

But together I think they give you more useful context than a follower count, without turning every profile into a popularity contest.

It will still be possible to see how many people (and who) you follow and are following you, but it won't be public information on the profile.

I'm sure I'll change and refine these as Craftsky grows and I hear more feedback. But ultimately, I want to build a social experience where the numbers encourage you to make more, share more and enjoy your craft — rather than worry about whether you're growing quickly enough.