"How ‘Following’ vanished into meaninglessness"

This happened long before now. Twitter is famous for its follow-for-follow "scheme". It is strictly for inflating numbers. Period. It serves no other purpose. What good is 100/1000/1000000 followers if they aren't reading what you've written?

There are influencer types of "jobs" that require X number of followers per social media platform and that is one reason for this. The other is that people are just plain lazy.