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Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates So maybe the trick is to not jus

by nxm 2mo ago

Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.

ChicagoDave 2mo ago
80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents. I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
- waterheater 2mo ago
  The real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
  - ChicagoDave 2mo ago
    We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible. The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
    - waterheater 2mo ago
      Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?
      - ChicagoDave 2mo ago
        I’ll pass on using a platform owned by a white nationalist who’s betrayed his daughter, openly admitted attempting to rig elections, raided our government of life saving appropriations, destroyed public records, stolen social security data, and makes nearly all of his profits on government contracts while never paying taxes.
        archagon 2mo ago
        Indeed. Recent choice words from Musk: * "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor" * "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer) * "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason." * "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera) Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
      - numpad0 2mo ago
        They're charging on windows like hordes of zombies attracted to smell of flesh leaking from a bus as it inches forward. It's a horrible sight. They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually. It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
- Lerc 2mo ago
  Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle. I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me. I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters. There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets. Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
    - Lerc 2mo ago
      Isn't that because they are aiming for the biggest targets. Anything that became similarly successful would be similarly targeted. Being small enough that malicious actors are not interested in you is beneficial, but by definition it is a solution that cannot be widely adopted.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        It doesn't matter why, when you're talking about results.
  - numpad0 2mo ago
    Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.
actualwitch 2mo ago
For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0] [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
CharlesW 2mo ago
Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025. Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
dragonwriter 2mo ago
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards. (In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
- philipallstar 2mo ago
  X no longer makes the "people dogpiling conservatives is consequence culture" vs "people dogpiling far leftists is harassment" distinction, but BlueSky still does.
  - 1attice 2mo ago
    Perhaps the asymmetry has something to do with the fact that the conservatives are sharing memes about immigrants eating cats, and similar quality takes, during a profoundly fascist moment in American history, but what do I know? I'm just another snowflake
    - philipallstar 2mo ago
      Everyone is sharing everything. If you only focus on a few extremists (and only on the side you don't like) doing things you don't like, you can prove anything.
    - marcusverus 2mo ago
      Sounds like it, yeah.
  - axus 2mo ago
    What ever happened to the guy with the jet tracker
- syrrim 2mo ago
archagon 2mo ago
Anecdotally, 90% of the interesting tech/art/gamedev people I’ve followed have moved to Bluesky or Mastodon at this point, and they’re never coming back.
llm_nerd 2mo ago
> So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform. Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything. Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.

by nxm 2mo ago

Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.

ChicagoDave 2mo ago

80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents. I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.

waterheater 2mo ago
The real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
- ChicagoDave 2mo ago
  We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible. The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
  - waterheater 2mo ago
    Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?
    - ChicagoDave 2mo ago
      I’ll pass on using a platform owned by a white nationalist who’s betrayed his daughter, openly admitted attempting to rig elections, raided our government of life saving appropriations, destroyed public records, stolen social security data, and makes nearly all of his profits on government contracts while never paying taxes.
      - archagon 2mo ago
        Indeed. Recent choice words from Musk: * "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor" * "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer) * "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason." * "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera) Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
    - numpad0 2mo ago
      They're charging on windows like hordes of zombies attracted to smell of flesh leaking from a bus as it inches forward. It's a horrible sight. They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually. It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
Lerc 2mo ago
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle. I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me. I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- inigyou 2mo ago
  It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters. There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets. Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
  - Lerc 2mo ago
    Isn't that because they are aiming for the biggest targets. Anything that became similarly successful would be similarly targeted. Being small enough that malicious actors are not interested in you is beneficial, but by definition it is a solution that cannot be widely adopted.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      It doesn't matter why, when you're talking about results.
- numpad0 2mo ago
  Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.

actualwitch 2mo ago

For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0] [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

CharlesW 2mo ago

Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025. Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.

dragonwriter 2mo ago

The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards. (In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)

philipallstar 2mo ago
X no longer makes the "people dogpiling conservatives is consequence culture" vs "people dogpiling far leftists is harassment" distinction, but BlueSky still does.
- 1attice 2mo ago
  Perhaps the asymmetry has something to do with the fact that the conservatives are sharing memes about immigrants eating cats, and similar quality takes, during a profoundly fascist moment in American history, but what do I know? I'm just another snowflake
  - philipallstar 2mo ago
    Everyone is sharing everything. If you only focus on a few extremists (and only on the side you don't like) doing things you don't like, you can prove anything.
  - marcusverus 2mo ago
    Sounds like it, yeah.
- axus 2mo ago
  What ever happened to the guy with the jet tracker
syrrim 2mo ago

archagon 2mo ago

Anecdotally, 90% of the interesting tech/art/gamedev people I’ve followed have moved to Bluesky or Mastodon at this point, and they’re never coming back.

llm_nerd 2mo ago

> So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform. Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything. Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.