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Re:Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care by ish_ish on Thursday March 24, 2011 @04:44PM (#2365858)
There is a psychological factor to this that is used by games as well. People get addicted to collecting things whether they be tweets, comments, etc. I highly recommend Amy Jo Kim's video where she shows examples of this across several social apps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI

Re:Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care by kadavy on Thursday March 24, 2011 @04:30PM (#2365792)
Checking stats on something (how many followers someone has, or how many views a video has) is definitely a useful heuristic for deciding if something is worthy of your ever-more-precious attention. They call this "social proof."
Re:Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care by rishi on Thursday March 24, 2011 @04:38PM (#2365828)
Good point. It is pretty much equivalent to Customer Testimonials.