3 ms·

The numbers you see externally are the same as the ones used internally to reason about growth, and a great deal of care has been taken to keep them accurate.

by fizx 14y ago

The numbers you see externally are the same as the ones used internally to reason about growth, and a great deal of care has been taken to keep them accurate. Fake accounts are culled, and inactives or likely spammers aren't counted in the numbers.

adventured 14y ago
Fake accounts are culled? Apparently not very well. To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts are fake. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the supposedly active user base. Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption platform, with relatively few highly active producers.
- cantankerous 14y ago
  I think he meant that fake accounts were culled from the count, not in general.
  - ampersandy 14y ago
    Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts. Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.
    - cantankerous 14y ago
      Makes sense. Thanks for the correction!
xtrumanx 14y ago
By the way, here's a possible reason why you may have inactive accounts that you should be able to easily solve. I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task. I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet." 8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.

by fizx 14y ago

adventured 14y ago

Fake accounts are culled? Apparently not very well. To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts are fake. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the supposedly active user base. Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption platform, with relatively few highly active producers.

cantankerous 14y ago
I think he meant that fake accounts were culled from the count, not in general.
- ampersandy 14y ago
  Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts. Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks for the correction!

xtrumanx 14y ago

By the way, here's a possible reason why you may have inactive accounts that you should be able to easily solve. I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task. I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet." 8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.