7 ms·

How Twitter Users Compare to the General Public

55 points by prostoalex 8y ago

SolaceQuantum 8y ago
"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. And these most active tweeters are much more likely than others to say they post about political issues. Fully 69% of the top 10% most prolific tweeters say they have tweeted about politics, compared with 39% of Twitter users generally. And 42% say they have tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with just 13% of other users. The Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...." I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.
- taborj 8y ago
  And especially alarming when combined with this: " In fact, this analysis estimates that the top 10% of tweeters are responsible for 80% of the tweets created by all U.S. adults on Twitter."
  - RickS 8y ago
    Meh. Flipped another way, "90% of people in the US with twitter accounts don't post much if ever, and that long tail makes up 20% of twitter's US content" Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
  - overcast 8y ago
    Is this unexpected? Just like anywhere. 10% of the people are doing 90% of the work.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Heck, don't we even have a name for it because it happens all the time? Pareto distribution.
- RickS 8y ago
  > using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
  - bartread 8y ago
    I imagine there's some use of tools like Hootsuite (allows you to schedule tweets) in there as well. I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.
_Marak_ 8y ago
I'd like to see a study which compares the average sentiment of a user's Tweets to the amount of Tweets that user has published in their lifetime. From my casual observations I've seen a direct correlation between amount of lifetime Tweets a user has and the likelihood of them consistently Tweeting angry or hateful messages.
- matt4077 8y ago
  I’m not sure if # of tweets, which isn’t even equivalent to account age, is the appropriate figure here. Followers would be far more meaningful. I don’t check # of tweets and therefore can’t judge your observation. But lookin at some top tweets and users, their content seems to invariably be more nuanced and civil than replies to them, which are mostly from frothing-at-the-mouth dickheads with no followers.
writepub 8y ago
This is excellent data! 1. It has long been argued that Twitter has a liberal bias. This data proves it, with 60% of the users leaning left. 2. While the cause of #1 hasn't been established, it is likely that moderators and policy makers in Twitter live in left leaning cities in the US, with admittedly left leaning political views. These folks tend to favor one side in the their censorship. 3. If one considers the fact that 80% of the content is generated by 10%, and the politics of that 10% further skews left, one can see why Twitter looks like a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks. Meh, it's all relative. I'm not exactly on the left and while the left echo chamber may seem uninviting, the right-wing echo chamber (cough cough gab cough cough) somehow manages to be a lot worse.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    Agreed, although the right-wing echo chamber is rightly marginalized (in the literal sense of the word), while the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. I don't think the far-left should be pushed quite as far to the margins as the far-right, but not putting them so squarely in positions of massive influence would be a good start.
    - 0815test 8y ago
      > the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. Perhaps, but elite opinions in those sorts of highly-developed, urban institutions have been dominated by the "left" side of the political spectrum since we've had a recognizable left-right (or 'progressive-conservative') split. Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims left, there's nothing new under the sun. Of course many people think that today's left is too radical for its own good, but I wouldn't know how to even start to counter that tendency - and, again, you could say similar things about radicalism on the right - I remember what the Tea Party grassroots movement was like in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like the total craziness we see today!
msvan 8y ago
> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users. One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel. If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.
- iheartpotatoes 8y ago
  Twitter is the literal opposite of community-building, like usenet used to be. Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users we see online today. I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods, reddit would be even worse than it is right now.
  - snarf21 8y ago
    I would disagree. It is community building in a different construct. There is no /r/X or group structure built in. I am only Twitter because I design board games. I only interact with board game community accounts and posts. The community is diverse, varied and thriving. If I was trying to get 100K followers to argue about politics maybe I'd have a bad time. I'm just trying to say that there is a lot of community building but it is self-directed not controlled by the platform.
    - iheartpotatoes 8y ago
      >> It is community building in a different construct Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it? Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by their legions of followers.
wafflesraccoon 8y ago
Twitter is hands down my favorite social media platform, I really enjoy how I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests. It is also a great way to share my own content and interact with the people that are interested in it. There is also the unspoken benefit that unfollowing someone does not have the same social impact as unfriending someone on Facebook. (Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)
- haberman 8y ago
  You can unfollow people on Facebook without unfriending them. Works wonders for people who you have a relationship with, but don't necessarily need to see their stream of posts.
  - wafflesraccoon 8y ago
    I have not touched Facebook in years, I'm glad they have added that feature. I might have to check it out again, thanks.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      There's also a new 'snooze' feature, where you can 'snooze' a person for 30 days. Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels an awful lot like....work does. Everything compartmentalized, specific functions to deal with people down stream..
- duxup 8y ago
  >I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests How much work did that take you? I've tried to do what you describe.... but time and again I grow tired scrolling through hordes of "I really followed this person or thing to hear about this content but now they're tweeting about X" and found I constantly had to manage it. It was to the point that I just would rather keep bookmarks as websites are better at staying focused than most twitter accounts.
smacktoward 8y ago
> Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. I find this fascinating. If the data are correct, Twitter's most valuable users (the ones who write all the Tweets) are overwhelmingly (65%) women, and even among the less active "lurkers" women make up just a little less than half. And yet, ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness -- all of which Twitter has shown next to zero interest in curbing. It requires some seriously blinkered management to decide it's not important for your service to provide at least a minimally welcoming experience for its core audience.
- haberman 8y ago
  I don't think Twitter provides a welcoming experience for anybody. "Threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness" could be the site's slogan.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    I invite everyone to create a female persona on twitter and interact with your usual communities for a month. You will likely get the same “with all due respect...” responses as usual, but a surprising number of them will manage to meander their way, within just 280 chars, to “...and therefore you need a good rape.”
- cotelletta 8y ago
  Maybe this should finally clue you in that online harassment has always been a pass time for and by women. ED, Kiwifarms, do you really think it's mostly men who spend all that time concerned with social warfare, gossiping and reputational damage? The default on the internet is male, and the same goes for anons, because we expect women to make themselves noticable. When they don't, we assume they are men. But clearly social media is mainly for and by women. Maybe they ought to own up to that. I have never seen more drama and abuse as in female dominated groups. Men have an argument, fight, and then go have a beer. Women will waffle and try to appear the reasonable party, but only so they can stick the knife in the back later, and they rarely forgive. This is generally true, but any woman who does not fight this way is a treasure who you can invite into groups of men without changing the dynamic permanently.
aantix 8y ago
I've seen the trend with some news outlets to report "what people are saying" and by that, reference a bunch of tweets about the topic. Which is lazy reporting. But confirmed by this report, Twitter isn't the general public. Twitter is incredibly progressive and hotly political. If Twitter would have been the one voting, Hillary would have been voted into office. But they weren't, and there was a whole segment of the country ignored, that probably isn't on Twitter. And it's no wonder that half the tech sphere was "stunned" was Trump was able to wiggle his way into office.
aoner 8y ago
Slightly off-topic: am I the only one noticing massive amounts of fake accounts that are into climate denying?

55 points by prostoalex 8y ago

"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. And these most active tweeters are much more likely than others to say they post about political issues. Fully 69% of the top 10% most prolific tweeters say they have tweeted about politics, compared with 39% of Twitter users generally. And 42% say they have tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with just 13% of other users. The Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...." I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.

taborj 8y ago
And especially alarming when combined with this: " In fact, this analysis estimates that the top 10% of tweeters are responsible for 80% of the tweets created by all U.S. adults on Twitter."
- RickS 8y ago
  Meh. Flipped another way, "90% of people in the US with twitter accounts don't post much if ever, and that long tail makes up 20% of twitter's US content" Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
- overcast 8y ago
  Is this unexpected? Just like anywhere. 10% of the people are doing 90% of the work.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Heck, don't we even have a name for it because it happens all the time? Pareto distribution.
RickS 8y ago
> using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
- bartread 8y ago
  I imagine there's some use of tools like Hootsuite (allows you to schedule tweets) in there as well. I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.

_Marak_ 8y ago

I'd like to see a study which compares the average sentiment of a user's Tweets to the amount of Tweets that user has published in their lifetime. From my casual observations I've seen a direct correlation between amount of lifetime Tweets a user has and the likelihood of them consistently Tweeting angry or hateful messages.

matt4077 8y ago
I’m not sure if # of tweets, which isn’t even equivalent to account age, is the appropriate figure here. Followers would be far more meaningful. I don’t check # of tweets and therefore can’t judge your observation. But lookin at some top tweets and users, their content seems to invariably be more nuanced and civil than replies to them, which are mostly from frothing-at-the-mouth dickheads with no followers.

writepub 8y ago

This is excellent data! 1. It has long been argued that Twitter has a liberal bias. This data proves it, with 60% of the users leaning left. 2. While the cause of #1 hasn't been established, it is likely that moderators and policy makers in Twitter live in left leaning cities in the US, with admittedly left leaning political views. These folks tend to favor one side in the their censorship. 3. If one considers the fact that 80% of the content is generated by 10%, and the politics of that 10% further skews left, one can see why Twitter looks like a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.

0815test 8y ago
> a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks. Meh, it's all relative. I'm not exactly on the left and while the left echo chamber may seem uninviting, the right-wing echo chamber (cough cough gab cough cough) somehow manages to be a lot worse.
- weberc2 8y ago
  Agreed, although the right-wing echo chamber is rightly marginalized (in the literal sense of the word), while the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. I don't think the far-left should be pushed quite as far to the margins as the far-right, but not putting them so squarely in positions of massive influence would be a good start.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    > the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. Perhaps, but elite opinions in those sorts of highly-developed, urban institutions have been dominated by the "left" side of the political spectrum since we've had a recognizable left-right (or 'progressive-conservative') split. Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims left, there's nothing new under the sun. Of course many people think that today's left is too radical for its own good, but I wouldn't know how to even start to counter that tendency - and, again, you could say similar things about radicalism on the right - I remember what the Tea Party grassroots movement was like in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like the total craziness we see today!

msvan 8y ago

> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users. One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel. If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.

iheartpotatoes 8y ago
Twitter is the literal opposite of community-building, like usenet used to be. Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users we see online today. I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods, reddit would be even worse than it is right now.
- snarf21 8y ago
  I would disagree. It is community building in a different construct. There is no /r/X or group structure built in. I am only Twitter because I design board games. I only interact with board game community accounts and posts. The community is diverse, varied and thriving. If I was trying to get 100K followers to argue about politics maybe I'd have a bad time. I'm just trying to say that there is a lot of community building but it is self-directed not controlled by the platform.
  - iheartpotatoes 8y ago
    >> It is community building in a different construct Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it? Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by their legions of followers.

wafflesraccoon 8y ago

Twitter is hands down my favorite social media platform, I really enjoy how I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests. It is also a great way to share my own content and interact with the people that are interested in it. There is also the unspoken benefit that unfollowing someone does not have the same social impact as unfriending someone on Facebook. (Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)

haberman 8y ago
You can unfollow people on Facebook without unfriending them. Works wonders for people who you have a relationship with, but don't necessarily need to see their stream of posts.
- wafflesraccoon 8y ago
  I have not touched Facebook in years, I'm glad they have added that feature. I might have to check it out again, thanks.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    There's also a new 'snooze' feature, where you can 'snooze' a person for 30 days. Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels an awful lot like....work does. Everything compartmentalized, specific functions to deal with people down stream..
duxup 8y ago
>I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests How much work did that take you? I've tried to do what you describe.... but time and again I grow tired scrolling through hordes of "I really followed this person or thing to hear about this content but now they're tweeting about X" and found I constantly had to manage it. It was to the point that I just would rather keep bookmarks as websites are better at staying focused than most twitter accounts.

smacktoward 8y ago

> Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. I find this fascinating. If the data are correct, Twitter's most valuable users (the ones who write all the Tweets) are overwhelmingly (65%) women, and even among the less active "lurkers" women make up just a little less than half. And yet, ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness -- all of which Twitter has shown next to zero interest in curbing. It requires some seriously blinkered management to decide it's not important for your service to provide at least a minimally welcoming experience for its core audience.

haberman 8y ago
I don't think Twitter provides a welcoming experience for anybody. "Threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness" could be the site's slogan.
- matt4077 8y ago
  I invite everyone to create a female persona on twitter and interact with your usual communities for a month. You will likely get the same “with all due respect...” responses as usual, but a surprising number of them will manage to meander their way, within just 280 chars, to “...and therefore you need a good rape.”
cotelletta 8y ago
Maybe this should finally clue you in that online harassment has always been a pass time for and by women. ED, Kiwifarms, do you really think it's mostly men who spend all that time concerned with social warfare, gossiping and reputational damage? The default on the internet is male, and the same goes for anons, because we expect women to make themselves noticable. When they don't, we assume they are men. But clearly social media is mainly for and by women. Maybe they ought to own up to that. I have never seen more drama and abuse as in female dominated groups. Men have an argument, fight, and then go have a beer. Women will waffle and try to appear the reasonable party, but only so they can stick the knife in the back later, and they rarely forgive. This is generally true, but any woman who does not fight this way is a treasure who you can invite into groups of men without changing the dynamic permanently.

aantix 8y ago

I've seen the trend with some news outlets to report "what people are saying" and by that, reference a bunch of tweets about the topic. Which is lazy reporting. But confirmed by this report, Twitter isn't the general public. Twitter is incredibly progressive and hotly political. If Twitter would have been the one voting, Hillary would have been voted into office. But they weren't, and there was a whole segment of the country ignored, that probably isn't on Twitter. And it's no wonder that half the tech sphere was "stunned" was Trump was able to wiggle his way into office.

aoner 8y ago

Slightly off-topic: am I the only one noticing massive amounts of fake accounts that are into climate denying?