I was talking in chat today with a few people and the discussion was basically about how the best way to actually get subscribers is to just subscribe to anyone with any hint of talent and let most of them sub back (because it's just common courtesy, really). I sort of reached this conclusion after thinking about how I'm subscribed to very few people and as a result I might not have quite as many subscribers as other people in the community who do throw out subscriptions to anyone who breathes, and that doesn't seem quite right to me.

Anyway, to get around to the point, I have two suggestions-

1.) On profiles, also show and who and how many users the person is subscribed to. I don't quite understand why this wasn't already implemented, and I see absolutely no reason as to why it shouldn't be there.

2.) Still show the number of subscribers on any given profile, but don't allow them to be viewed. This would shut down all the unspoken sub4sub going on, and subscriptions would become more of a legitimate liking instead of a grab for attention. Mods would still need to be able to view who is subscribed to a person to make sure there's no alternate accounts created to just raise the number of subscribers, but otherwise there aren't any obvious flaws. I realize that a lot of people will say "But I like seeing who likes my projects D:", but to be honest, most people only care about the number. If you really do care about the person, rather than looking at your profile, you can look at them and see if they're subscribed to you, so problem solved there.


That's about all.