Is it better to follow or be followed?

One question that comes up on the relationship debate is whether it is better "to love or be loved"? Luckily on Steemit you don't have to limit your love to just one person as there is a whole community out there to share your passion with.

However, it did get me wondering whether there was any difference between the users that have amassed a large following versus the users that follow a lot of people. Well, thanks to SteemWhales.com I was able to make a quick comparison between the top 25 users for both followers and the number of people followed, and here's what it looks like:

I guess it was a little bit disappointing not to find anything that stands out immediately (but I am slowly getting used to this when it comes to Steemit). But when I looked a little bit further into it there was something quite interesting.

Not surprisingly, if you look at the table on the left with the top 25 users ranked by the number of people they are following, you'll find that you don't necessarily get a lot of followers by just following other people. When I calculated the ratio of Followers to the number of users they were Following (F/F column), there were four users (@joanaltres, @always1success, @cryptoriddler and @imagediet) that had a very high value compared to everyone else in the list.

Now if you look at the table on the right with the top 25 users ranked by the number of Followers, wouldn't you know they made up four of the top five users based on the number of followers. Sure, the sheer number of people that @lautenglye and @melowd still meant that they were high up in the list, but otherwise no other users featured on both lists.

I would like to draw your attention to the average F/F ratio between the two tables, where I have taken the liberty of removing some outliers (like @ned and @steemitboard) to try and capture the general trend and make the calculations easier.

Average F/F ratio for top ranked users by Following: 0.26
Average F/F ratio for top ranked users by Followers: 1.13

I know that we would all like to have more followers on Steemit, and it might seem counter-intuitive that you would actually gain more followers by following people, but if you were looking at the most successful Steemians in terms of Followings (i.e. number of people they follow) and Followers (i.e. number of people that follow them), what I take from the analysis is that there is a lot of focus on Steemit on building reciprocal/mutually beneficial relationships. I see this as the explanation to why users ranked the highest on number of followers also seem to follow a similar number of people but not the other way around.

What do you think? It would be quite interesting to look at whether this relationship holds true for other segments of the Steemian population, but I will save that story for when I master the intricacies of steemsql.com...

P.S. I tried using the Steemit - Dead Followers website (http://steemit.deadfollowers.info/) created by @mynameisbrian to see if there is a difference between the % of dead followers on both lists but it was taking too long. I'll try to do a follow up post if I get a chance...

P.P.S. I guess maybe @joanaltres just has too many followers (18,382) for Steemit - Dead Followers to process. It certainly had no problem trying to work out how many dead followers I had, although there was a discrepancy between the number of followers it thinks I have versus what it says on my profile page... but that's another problem altogether.