If you don’t know, who do you ask?

I’d been asking, like a smart aleck or wise guy school-kid, a couple of Artificial Intelligence apps (Gemini and ChatGPT) questions to see if I could stump them. The apps provide disclaimers. ChatGPT cautions, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” I questioned ChatGPT what is meant by “important.” In short, important is any fact or idea that you might rely on to your detriment if proven wrong.

I was also thinking of the Universe, and William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand….The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply.”

I asked ChatGPT how many photos had been uploaded to Instagram since its beginning:

Based on the latest available data, here’s what we know about Instagram:

📸 Total Photos & Videos Shared

Instagram has seen over 50 billion photos and videos uploaded since its launch on October 6, 2010 wired.com+4en.wikipedia.org+4time.com+4increditools.com+4earthweb.com+4predis.ai+4.

📈 Recent Upload Rates

Estimates from mid‑2024 to early 2025 indicate that:

• Roughly 1,074 photos/video posts are uploaded per second
• That equates to about 95 million posts per day, or almost 4 million per hour

I retrieved that data a few days ago, so I caution my reader to recheck the numbers with ChatGPT if important. The universe is expanding.

I then asked ChatGPT about blogs, how many new blog posts go up daily:

WordPress.com alone sees roughly 2.3 million new blog posts per day.

All blogging platforms combined—WordPress.org, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, self-hosted setups, and more—generate around 7.5 million posts daily.

I then asked, considering social media formats, at what point, a tipping point or a break-even point – what is the number or percent a user can functionally follow other users? ChatGPT’s answer was long and involved, including definitions I had not specifically asked for:

Tipping Point in Following Behavior
This is the point at which a user starts experiencing diminishing returns from following more accounts — the quality of their feed drops, content becomes more generic or algorithmically filtered, and they lose meaningful engagement with individuals.

Breakeven Point for Social Value
This could be defined as the point where a user’s following count results in reciprocal value — e.g., they follow others and start receiving useful content or engagement in return.

I might have thought ChatGPT would quote John Cage somewhere in its answer, but it did not. The Cage quote I might have suggested, my paraphrase here: “If you don’t know the answer, why are you asking the question”?

One     day                                                     down     at
   Black     Mountain     College,
                                                                      David     
Tudor     was     eating     his     lunch.

                                           A     student     came     over
    to     his     table     and     began     asking     him
 questions.

                                       David     Tudor
                                                                  went     on
 eating     his     lunch.

          The     student
                                     kept     on     asking     
questions.

                                   Finally
              David     Tudor     looked     at     him     and
 said,
                             “If     you     don’t     know,

                                             why     do      you      ask?”

Copied from “Indeterminacy,” compiled by Eddie Kohler, here.

Why, indeed, not to mention who. Who (or what) do you ask? (And before you get your red pencil out, I know all about who and whom, but I’ve my own style book here at the Toads, and I’ve unfollowed whom, so don’t bother.) I first read “Indeterminacy” in John Cage’s book titled “Silence” (1961, 1973, Wesleyan) – from page 260:

“In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it’s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can” (260).

Part of ChatGPT’s answer to my question regarding the number of social media accounts one can follow or be followed with meaningful contact referenced “Dunbar’s Number”:

📊 Data-Based Estimates and Psychological Limits

1. Cognitive Limit — Dunbar’s Number (~150)

• Humans can meaningfully maintain social relationships with around 150 people.
• In social media, this is often expanded because of the passive nature of interaction — but past ~500–1,000 follows, users typically experience:
  • Less meaningful engagement
  • Algorithmic filtering becomes dominant

👉 Tipping point for meaningful social following: ~150–500 follows
Beyond that, you don’t “functionally” follow people — the algorithm filters most content out.

What is meaningful or reciprocally engaging of course differs depending on one’s purpose or goal and the type of social media format one’s using. I did know the answer, but I wanted ChatGPT to confirm and provide some data with support. I was just playing around. But I had not heard of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is 150 – humans can interact meaningfully with 150 others. A further breakdown of Dunbar’s Number as supplied by ChatGPT follows:

Dunbar’s Number (~150) is more than just a single limit. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, proposed that human social relationships are layered in discrete tiers, each with its own emotional closeness and frequency of interaction.

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🔹 Dunbar’s Social Group Layers

These layers form a hierarchy of relationships, expanding by a rough factor of ~3 at each level:

Layer	Approx. Size	Relationship Type	Characteristics
1. Support Clique	3–5	Closest relationships	Daily contact, deep emotional support (best friends, close family)
2. Sympathy Group	12–15	Good friends	Weekly contact, trusted confidants
3. Close Network	~50	Friends you would invite to a party	Monthly contact, mutual interest, still emotionally meaningful
4. Casual Network	~150	Dunbar’s Number	People you know and recognize by name/face, occasional contact
5. Acquaintances	~500	Recognizable individuals	Low or no emotional intensity, weak ties (colleagues, mutuals)
6. Faces Known	~1,500	People whose faces you recognize	Stored in memory, but not personally connected

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🔸 What This Means for Social Media

• Most people can recognize ~1,500 profiles, but only maintain meaningful interaction with ~150.
• Your Instagram close friends list or Twitter DMs likely reflects the 15–50 layer.
• Follows, likes, or casual comments beyond the 150–500 range are often algorithmically or socially shallow. 

I don’t mention any of this to cause or reflect distress, and I think most users intuitively realize a law of large numbers at work with regard to social media accounts, but I want to emphasize the importance, significance, or value of any relatively small number of followers writers may have, or may be following, not necessarily as “follow backs” without ever looking again, but in efforts to maintain meaningful reading and writing encounters, effort that takes time and trust and mutual engagement.

There is of course much more to this discussion one might pursue (the phenomenom of likes and comments, or lack thereof, for example), but this has been question and answer enough. To follow is not necessarily to befriend; to unfollow is not necessarily to defriend. In summary, I’m reminded of the advice Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to his son Laertes:

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).

But Polonius, in spite of his reputation for sound advice, is a bumbling fool and not to be trusted, and anyway, who wants to be grappled to another’s soul with a hoop of steel, particularly where grapple means wrestle and struggle?