I wish I was making this up.

Psychologists have long known that people enjoy belonging to insular and self-congratulatory social networks. Behavioral economists know that people love the idea of easy money enough to do some really fucking stupid shit.

Here's the gist, quoted from the website:

New to followe.rs?
This is how it works:

...Oh, and you get PAID!

Very few of us, however, seem to understand that joining this meta-network will devalue the meaning of "a lot of friends" on an already silly and useless web service.

That, and shouldn't it be a lot harder to convince people to put their credentials into a couple of submission fields at some random fucking website? Well apparently not -- not when the lure of easy money is involved.

I mostly love that this is essentially an automated endless circlejerk. And, I also love that people think this is, somehow, going to make them money. I hate that it's taking advantage of a few basic human weaknesses in a debased manner, the surest sign of a scam. The only one getting paid from this is probably the developer, who charges a dollar per invite to the system. That's a meager sum for just one user, but twitter has millions of users, thousands of whom might actually care about something like this and be inclined to spend a dollar on it. It adds up to an enormous scam for the guy getting paid at the end.

Half of the Internet is porn, the other half is Ponzi-esque schemes.

[followe.rs]