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Yeah but Reddit and Twitter both have realized their financial well-being depends on Monthly Active Users, and bots look like active users. They simply threw et
by awalton 9y ago
Yeah but Reddit and Twitter both have realized their financial well-being depends on Monthly Active Users, and bots look like active users. They simply threw ethics away and gun straight for the capital.
The only reason Twitter did this was to make it look like they were doing something to improve the platform. Twitter won't notice $2M from their balance sheets if it bumps their stock price a few cents, but they will notice the dollars off their stock price when they decide to stop lying about how much traffic from human beings they're actually servicing vs the massive bot infestation.
- Retric 9y agoBots cost them money for zero direct benefit so they do hurt profitability.
- koolba 9y agoBots create an illusion of activity and relevance. They fill an important niche in the twitter ecosystem as without them it’d look like the sad and empty dive bar it truly is.
- hwillis 9y agoIt's a snowball effect. Bigger numbers and more activity help indirectly, eg by attracting celebrities. In turn they attract more real people.
- rsynnott 9y agoTwitter is under immense pressure to show a growing user base. Getting rid of the bots would likely cause month-on-month figures to actually fall, which would presumably be a problem.
- boxy310 9y agoThey recently had a recalculation of MAU due to a misreporting -- users that used to have organic posts, but were now only sending out pre-scheduled messages, like ghosts in the machine. How they handled that was to back-date all the reporting. Presumably bot traffic does not generate any additional advertising value, so re-fitting the number of MAU would increase the average ad reach/user value proposition. The importance is the trend, not necessarily the overall level.
- bluetwo 9y agoI'm going to guess whatever salesperson got the commission on 2 million dollars noticed.
- banderman 9y agoMaybe a better metric is number of monthly users from consumer ISP IPs?