[webmaven]

> I don't recommend that any community makes a social media follower equivalent in value to an academic citation metric, but there may be specific cases where, for example, having more than 1000 social media followers grants you the same allowance of a resource (e.g. compute cycles, or disk space) as having 1 research paper cited in a prestigious journal.

Okay, let's explore that. Now a researcher has an incentive to go buy social media followers as a hack to get compute resources.

The problem with these sorts of equivalencies is that they are often transitive ($ = followers, followers = compute, therefore $ = compute). I've exploited some myself in a small way (eg. created Gmail accounts to generate 'referrals' to get more free storage), but many developer services have recently had to discontinue their free tiers due to exploitation for mining bitcoin, and there is a whole subculture of travel points and credit card reward hacks, eg. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-...

Formalizing a mechanism for reputational equivalencies could lead to an explosion of exploitable edge cases similar in spirit to privilege escalation in a security context.