I've seen the same phenomenon. I have 7.4k followers. Most of them started following me last October and November around the time the 100 follower rule was announced, maybe hoping I'd follow them back? I never did (I only follow people whose work I read) and the follower growth dropped drastically to a small trickle. And, of course, there is the fact that there has been no conversion of followers to dollars. Absolutely no correlation. I'm not concerned about that as long as people are reading and subscribing to my work, but it does point out that the system is somehow broken . It reminds me of when I first ran my wordpress blog and suddenly got thousands of "commenters," all but a few of whom were spammers. A good spam blocker add-in took care of that, but you would expect those controls to be built in here.