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I am working on a mobile app that will have a friends and follower feature. Should a user's profile page display how many friends they have and how many people are following them? What advantages and disadvantages are there to displaying the count? Should a user be more concerned with who is in their network and less about how many people are in their network?

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    This is part of making social networks an addiction. People crave for attention, and numbers are an easy proxy indicator for that.
    – Deer Hunter
    Commented Jan 21, 2014 at 5:58
  • Can a social app survive without it?
    – Ivan Lesko
    Commented Jan 21, 2014 at 6:39
  • Think of the count as the system state indicator. In some cases, it could be treated as key performance indicator.
    – Alexey Kolchenko
    Commented Jan 21, 2014 at 9:51

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Stats and numbers are what distinguish novice users from experienced ones. It's a reward for having been active on the platform and using it more than another person might have.

Specific to your application, you've mentioned that a user can have Friends as well as Followers. Looking at a few examples of such an implementation, Facebook introduced Subscribers in 2011 in addition to Friends.

Advantages

  • Quick indicator of the person's status on the platform. Older, or more influential users are likely to have higher counts.
  • A decision maker for users deciding whether they should follow a person or not. The count is correlated to the quality of posts.
  • Useful as a distinguisher in the case of duplicate profiles of influential users. User is more likely to follow the more active profile.

Real vs fake Rihanna profile on Twitter



Disadvantages

  • The user might not want a certain stat to be public. Facebook allowed the ability to hide friend list and count in late 2009.
  • If your model depends upon paying to see certain privileges. LinkedIn for example shows connections and parts of the profile only if you have a connection.
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Every social network out there displays, at least to the user, the number of friends/followers they have. People like to feel accomplished. People see a higher number of followers/friends as that accomplishment in a social network, especially content creators. People who go out of their way to create content for your site gauge their "worth" as a participant of the site based on how many likes/reblogs/shares/notes/etc they get based on that content, and in turn how many people follow/friend them as a result of creating that content.

So yes. You do need a friend/follower count. It retains users. Without it no one feels the need to come back.

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As wtfsven and abhinavc said the numbers help distinguish users but it does so by rewarding a certain type of behaviour. You asked whether a social app can survive without such numbers and I would say yes, it can. But would you really want to do without them? I don't know what your social network revolves around but there is plenty of options to use a quantifier to reward a type of behaviour that you want to endorse. StackExchange rewards contributions by tying reputation gained from answers to power within the community. Number of followers/friends is just one attribute that can be used but in my opinion there are many other options that are more appealing.

TL; DR. Use points/achievements/badges to reward the user behaviour that helps evolve your network.

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