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"We undercount active users whose accounts are protected, accounts that view tweets but don’t send any, and accounts that log in and engage in other ways beyond
by morsch 4y ago
"We undercount active users whose accounts are protected, accounts that view tweets but don’t send any, and accounts that log in and engage in other ways beyond tweeting (like favoriting or adding profiles to lists)."
My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio between lurkers and active posters.
Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and, these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother customizing their profile.
- avs733 4y agoso much of this thread is 'proof' that supports whatever elon musk is trying to do, but seems to not realize this is a totally independent actor making a dubious set of assumptions to come to a number. This analysis might be interesting because it is timely but it has no bearing on the musk twitter acquisition anymore than me running such an analysis does.
- hotpotamus 4y agoYeah, I never knew I was a bot. I thought I just had a passing interest in a few people on Twitter and not much of interest to share of my own.
- kurthr 4y agoYep, me too.
- dylan604 4y agoThat's because you took the blue pill.
- tinsmith 4y agoI remember when I found out I was a bot. It was during a harrowing judgement conflict with an image-based captcha about traffic lights, and caused a complete shutdown of my higher order processes. To this day, I still don't know the threshold of how much traffic light actually needs to be in a square to be considered for selection, so I just stopped logging in to everything.
- zachrip 4y agoTwitter is as hostile to unauthenticated users nowadays as reddit is. Really sad.
- curiousllama 4y agoYea, I have an account that is literally just for reading 3 peoples' tweets (they're former generals that frequently comment on Russia's invasion of Ukraine). I have their timelines bookmarked, and just read the threads they post. I'd almost certainly be marked as a bot.
- londons_explore 4y agoI don't think accounts like yours are marked as bots... They're just not counted.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoBut since the 20% in TFA is a fraction that must necessarily include a denominator, the denominator in this post is wrong. Maybe by a large factor.
- burner556 4y agoCan you share the accounts please? Sounds interesting.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoThere's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
- vorpalhex 4y agoIf you have not tweeted.. you are excluded from this analysis. A spam account is gonna spam right? But some real users of twitter may only tweet once a year. This study just doesn't include you. It isn't saying you are spam, just not including you in the count.
- mintplant 4y agoThe population of accounts that tweet is going to contain a larger proportion of spammers than the population of active Twitter accounts. Presenting the former as the latter is disingenuous.
- nickff 4y agoThere are probably many 'fake' or bot accounts that don't tweet; they'd be used to prop up the 'likes' or views of other accounts, either customers paying for exposure, or other bots.
- minsc_and_boo 4y agoOr are simply used to bypass Twitter's semi-aggressive login wall. Anecdotally, I know plenty of non-robot people who have twitter accounts but don't tweet.
- ahahahahah 4y agoYeah, but it's just clickbait then. An honest title would be "We sampled users that act like bots on Twitter and found out that lots of them were bots".