People can say "I'm following you" and I guess you could add those up to get a lower bound.
Look, we have certain ideas about what constitutes a healthy environment for our users. We are going to try not to sabotage ourselves in what we build into the environment. We know perfectly well that you don't live your entire lives on this site. We also know it's arrogant for a bunch of adults you don't even know to try to make decisions about your lives, but not making a decision is just a different decision, and not a very good one, I think.
But there's a big difference between not building bad features into the environment and spending all our time trying to police it. If you guys really want a popularity contest you'll find a way. The best we can do is try to build an environment in which the things you're meant to do are engaging, and make it as easy as possible for you to do those things. I tell people all the time that it took us three times to get the visual representation for lambda expressions (i.e., gray rings) right. Our first version, in BYOB3, was terrible. We did a second round in BYOB 3.1 that was better, but still not good enough. Only in Snap! 4.0 did we get it right. That's the sort of thing that's a good use of our time.
Every time I see a flagged forum post I groan. That's not a good use of our time.
Putting in stars and hearts wouldn't be a good use of time, but neither would building AI programs to sniff out illicit popularity contests.