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by codingdave 3913 days ago
Twitter does not need to gain new users - it needs to reactivate old users. The statistic I cannot get past is that they have lost one billion users. That is a much different problem than most companies are dealing with.
2 comments

I honestly wonder how many of twitter's accounts are fake accounts, it seems that spam is a huge problem there.
No idea. But I'd throw $100 their way to buy an account that's been dormant for six years.
Due to vanity reasons (they have "your" handle?) or for some other reason?
It correlates to a domain for a site I'm in the process of building. I haven't registered the brand's trademark yet, so I'm unable to claim the Twitter username based on that criteria. Seems like the only route they provide for this kind of thing.
I believe if you have the domain name you should be able to get the twitter handle. You can always just submit for a trademark, that's easy and cheap.
I've never registered a trademark before. Is there anything more to it than paying the fee and filing the paperwork for a business that's not yet operational?
why?
Dormant accounts can hold good handles forever. Like the name of my website: https://twitter.com/improvely
Imagine you have to write an algorithm to determine twitter spam. Would it include accountCreatedDate?
The algorithm would probably contain a dummy variable representing isYoungerThanXDays where X is the median number of time it takes to create a new account after it has been banned.

I doubt accounts that are Y days old vs. Z years old have different probabilities of being spammers.

Probably quite a few, but no matter what an inactive account is -- spam, a novelty account, or an actual inactive person -- if you have 3 times as many inactive accounts as active accounts, there is something awry.
Twitter is not like Facebook or Instagram or What's App. Most of the daily users are not actually logged in users, they consume the information in other ways like Google searches, widgets on news articles or entertainment websites. Facebook and every other app don't have this ability, everything is locked up because of privacy settings so the only people that ever see it are the people you allow. So, even if you're not a logged in Twitter user you still can see the ads and be monetized. Tell me the same for any other popular app out there.
Instagram accounts aren't private by default, and posts can be embedded in other web pages (e.g. a lot of clickbait "journalism" does this), though it does not have a friendly logged-out interface like Twitter.