4 ms·

Statistically, almost no one is on Twitter. I think the recent numbers I saw were less than 3% of people send 90% of tweets and only 8% of Twitter users tweet a

Statistically, almost no one is on Twitter. I think the recent numbers I saw were less than 3% of people send 90% of tweets and only 8% of Twitter users tweet at all.

fleddr 5y ago
I only lurk on Twitter and recently have been paying some more attention to such numbers. One thing that indeed sticks out is that if you take a particular topic and inspect the leaders in that topic, many have more than 100K tweets. That's over 270 tweets per day if you'd compress it to a year. A quick glance at these leaders' timelines shows that they tweet all day every day, you need to scroll endlessly to just catch up with a few hours of their activity. It's basically all they do. On the other end of the spectrum are indeed people that never tweet or hardly ever tweet. And there's an important in-between category. People that do use it frequently, mostly commenting on those extreme leaders, yet for some mysterious reason, they can never get above the magical number of 2,000 followers themselves. They are basically the cannon fodder for the Twitter elites. It is them that like, retweet and comment, all to boost people already winning at the game even further.
- stevage 5y ago
  Why is 2000 a magical number?
  - fleddr 5y ago
    I don't know, just a pattern I spotted.
SonicScrub 5y ago
I remember reading something similar that studied online spaces in general and found similar trends. I wasn't able to find that article, but I found this one for Twitter [1]. It's an important to remember that when lurking any online forums. The vast majority of content is submitted by individuals who live their entire lives through online spaces. The narratives being formed by people who are by definition, not normal. Sometimes that can be beneficial, like when one person submits over 76k SQL answers on Stack Overflow [2], and sometimes it can be destructive, like when a tiny fraction of disconnected radicals can present fringe political ideas as mainstream (aided by a complicit media). Somewhat related, I encountered this curious phenomenon myself accidently when trawling through CBC news articles in the lead up to the latest Canadian election. I casually scrolled through the comments for some guilty pleasure entertainment, and found the same few commenters posting on every single article. I took a peak at the profiles of two commenters who were flighting over their political view points and found they each had over 100k comments.... On CBC news articles.... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642326
- david_allison 5y ago
  > I remember reading something similar that studied online spaces in general and found similar trends. Probably "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Statistically, almost no one is on Twitter. I think the recent numbers I saw were less than 3% of people send 90% of tweets and only 8% of Twitter users tweet at all.

fleddr 5y ago

I only lurk on Twitter and recently have been paying some more attention to such numbers. One thing that indeed sticks out is that if you take a particular topic and inspect the leaders in that topic, many have more than 100K tweets. That's over 270 tweets per day if you'd compress it to a year. A quick glance at these leaders' timelines shows that they tweet all day every day, you need to scroll endlessly to just catch up with a few hours of their activity. It's basically all they do. On the other end of the spectrum are indeed people that never tweet or hardly ever tweet. And there's an important in-between category. People that do use it frequently, mostly commenting on those extreme leaders, yet for some mysterious reason, they can never get above the magical number of 2,000 followers themselves. They are basically the cannon fodder for the Twitter elites. It is them that like, retweet and comment, all to boost people already winning at the game even further.

stevage 5y ago
Why is 2000 a magical number?
- fleddr 5y ago
  I don't know, just a pattern I spotted.

SonicScrub 5y ago

I remember reading something similar that studied online spaces in general and found similar trends. I wasn't able to find that article, but I found this one for Twitter [1]. It's an important to remember that when lurking any online forums. The vast majority of content is submitted by individuals who live their entire lives through online spaces. The narratives being formed by people who are by definition, not normal. Sometimes that can be beneficial, like when one person submits over 76k SQL answers on Stack Overflow [2], and sometimes it can be destructive, like when a tiny fraction of disconnected radicals can present fringe political ideas as mainstream (aided by a complicit media). Somewhat related, I encountered this curious phenomenon myself accidently when trawling through CBC news articles in the lead up to the latest Canadian election. I casually scrolled through the comments for some guilty pleasure entertainment, and found the same few commenters posting on every single article. I took a peak at the profiles of two commenters who were flighting over their political view points and found they each had over 100k comments.... On CBC news articles.... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642326

david_allison 5y ago
> I remember reading something similar that studied online spaces in general and found similar trends. Probably "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...