1) It's a reliable proxy-statistic for Nostr's growth. When Nostr's userbase expands rapidly, everyone's follow count noticeably goes up, even mine. That hasn't happened in months. 2) Newer arrivals aren't Advanced Nostr-ing, like that. Hardly anyone is. They only use follows, to build their feed. They get onboarded with a preset recommendation list and it mostly just stays like that, so those lists determine everyone's feed. 3) My not being on the recommended list, but regularly trending, leads to the weird situation that lots of npubs think they're following me, that actually aren't. I just seem to drop out of their feed, for days or weeks at a time, so they can't see what I write. And so on. Follows is a whole politikum.