For a few brief, glorious moments on Monday, as Twitter responded to a security issue by reverting all follower counts to zero, we were all equals. The neoest of neophytes had as many followers as Oprah or Ashton. (Hell, I had as many followers as @awsamuel. When was the last time that happened?)

Now the old order has been restored, and metrics-obsessed mavens can go back to human-bean-counting (I’ll admit it, I’m one of them). But I would have liked to see how things might have worked out if the follower-count-outage had lasted a few days instead of a few minutes. How would it have changed how we interact? Would we have resorted to deciding whether to engage with someone based on the quality of their conversation, or would we have found some other proxy for their capital-I Importance?