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The problem is this will reduce impressions by unique users as well. Once a user hits the daily tweet limit (easy to do if you scroll and view a few viral threa

• logifail 3y ago
  > if Twitter CTR is low, then you need a _lot_ of unique users to actually generate conversions You don't want to on a platform that has loads of unique "users" and impressions if most of those users are bots, though. Perhaps quality is actually better than quantity?
  • jljljl 3y ago
    Pre-Elon the bot count was something like 5% of active users, meaning a broad approach like this will affect significantly more real users than bots. There are probably more fine tuned ways to reduce bots that don’t degrade the experience for your biggest users.
    • logifail 3y ago
      > Pre-Elon the bot count was something like 5% of active users Is there a reliable source for that figure? Also, are we talking about 5% of accounts (active accounts/total accounts?) or 5% of pageviews or some other metric? I'm struggling to see any incentive for platforms to be honest about how many bots they get.
      • jljljl 3y ago
        Twitter reported in their financial statements that less than 5% of their monetizable daily active users were spam or fake accounts. They did disclose some errors in methodology in 2022, but not enough to make a substantial difference to that estimate. They shared their methodology for estimating with Musk’s acquisition team and with the SEC. One can claim that Twitter was lying about this number. But if he could prove they were lying, Musk would have gotten out of the deal.
        • logifail 3y ago
          > Twitter reported in their financial statements that less than 5% of their monetizable daily active users were spam or fake accounts If a human signs up for an account, and uses it occasionally, but there's ongoing automated scraping or posting using that account for a good chunk of the time - or more specifically "for the majority of the requests" - would we call that account spam or fake?
          • jljljl 3y ago
            That sounds like a huge speculation/hypothetical — is there evidence that was or is happening? To answer your question, it would depend on what the account was doing. Scraping abuse could likely be handled in a more targeted manner.
            • logifail 3y ago
              > That sounds like a huge speculation/hypothetical — is there evidence that was or is happening? I've signed up for websites before, manually, and switched to using automated tools to download all the content. Certainly more efficient than downloading stuff by hand. Isn't automation the kind of thing most developers would do in this scenario? If you're doing it right, the website doesn't even know. At least not until it's too late ;) Aside: a friend of mine wrote a script to perform the online check-in whenever he flew with his favourite airline. He reverse engineered the airline's official app, and duly wrote his own (Perl!) script to do the same. It spat out a pkpass file which he could load straight onto his phone.