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Did you try to introduce a new measure "MAU excluding bots"? Then over time the company could refocus around that and better policies be made

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
That seems like a good idea, but I suspect introducing a "MAU excluding bots" metric would look to investors like a sudden drop in MAU by 90%.
- mc32 5y ago
  It would seem reasonable for large investors, -those who have influence on a company, to require MAU excluding bots figures as part of their due diligence. On the other hand: FOMO, guess.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    The only economic actor directly hurt by bots is the advertiser, right? To some degree, it's against investors' incentives to attempt to strictly exclude bots. Obviously in the longterm it hurts value, but "doing things that don't scale" creates a lot of degrees of freedom (user growth, cashflow, funding) that you can use to pay off your "tech debt".
  - thomasahle 5y ago
    Thanks to this thread I now see why the bot problem is sad difficult to solve. It sticks deep. Damn.
ridaj 5y ago
Then more bots come in undetected and you have to rebase again when you find them. It's a continuous process. You need very understanding investors to pull this off. At the same time there's only so long you can sweep inauthentic engagement under the rug until someone calls you out for it.
mjr00 5y ago
I wasn't nearly senior enough to have any influence in something like that, but in the internal culture, MAU was seen as such a strong proxy for success that suggesting the metric was flawed would have been sacrilege. The company had big parties and put out press releases every time a multiple of 1 million MAU was hit. To point out that most of those users were bots abusing our service's free tier would be noticing the emperor had no clothes on.
akudha 5y ago
I don't understand why investors don't ask for numbers that exclude bots. Or maybe they do, and we just don't hear about it? This isn't some unknown problem, right? Bots have been around forever and they are a problem in many platforms, not just Twitter-like platforms.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

That seems like a good idea, but I suspect introducing a "MAU excluding bots" metric would look to investors like a sudden drop in MAU by 90%.

mc32 5y ago
It would seem reasonable for large investors, -those who have influence on a company, to require MAU excluding bots figures as part of their due diligence. On the other hand: FOMO, guess.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  The only economic actor directly hurt by bots is the advertiser, right? To some degree, it's against investors' incentives to attempt to strictly exclude bots. Obviously in the longterm it hurts value, but "doing things that don't scale" creates a lot of degrees of freedom (user growth, cashflow, funding) that you can use to pay off your "tech debt".
- thomasahle 5y ago
  Thanks to this thread I now see why the bot problem is sad difficult to solve. It sticks deep. Damn.

ridaj 5y ago

Then more bots come in undetected and you have to rebase again when you find them. It's a continuous process. You need very understanding investors to pull this off. At the same time there's only so long you can sweep inauthentic engagement under the rug until someone calls you out for it.

mjr00 5y ago

I wasn't nearly senior enough to have any influence in something like that, but in the internal culture, MAU was seen as such a strong proxy for success that suggesting the metric was flawed would have been sacrilege. The company had big parties and put out press releases every time a multiple of 1 million MAU was hit. To point out that most of those users were bots abusing our service's free tier would be noticing the emperor had no clothes on.

akudha 5y ago

I don't understand why investors don't ask for numbers that exclude bots. Or maybe they do, and we just don't hear about it? This isn't some unknown problem, right? Bots have been around forever and they are a problem in many platforms, not just Twitter-like platforms.