[michaelt]

> That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist

I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again.

Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?

[g-clef]

As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.

That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?

[chomp]

> Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.

It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings:

>We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.

>... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications.

Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.

[frumper]

This doesn’t resolve the issue the article has though. I’m a mDAU because I’ve logged in, yet there is no way for the people writing the article to know that I’m active.

[chomp]

Yeah the article has a few big issues, yours is definitely at the top.

[dado3212]

They could maybe use like activity in addition to just tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then an external organization isn’t going to have insight into that.

[dan1234]

I would imagine Twitter would have access to analytics that third parties don't have, which would allow them to pretty easily work out which accounts are logged in and used for browsing and which are actually abandoned.

[kadoban]

As a small complication: I have a twitter account, doubt I've ever tweeted. I browse twitter quite often, but I'm _never_ logged in.

No idea if I should be counted or not in any particular bucket, or how anyone would know.

[HWR_14]

AFAIK, you're not counted in any bucket. That's one reason TWTR wants you to log in to read. So active user numbers go up.

[dan1234]

I thought they used a banner that pretty much forced you to log in to see more than the first few tweets in a thread now (same as instagram)?

I have an account that is logged in, but it has only sent 7 tweets since 2014 (and they're only to customer service accounts).

[kadoban]

It doesn't seem to. A few months back it was ~forcing for a bit so I moved to nitter.

[natch]

What client are you using that allows you to browse without logging in?

[pseudo0]

Opening a Twitter link in a private tab is the low complexity solution, or there's nitter.net, or deleting cookies, or various browser extensions that delete cookies for you.

[kadoban]

I had no idea it was so strict. I just use Firefox. Their cookie behavior must be picky enough that it bypasses whatever nonsense Twitter is doing?

[pseudo0]

After posting that, I went back and retested. It looks like they have swapped back to a soft nag popup. For a few months it was hard blocking any further scrolling, at least with Chrome.

[kadoban]

Firefox :shrug: . It's never forced me. When it gets too annoying trying to push me to login I move to nitter.

[recursive]

Private browsing mode ("incognito" in Chrome)

[onion2k]

is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?

No. Which is why the only reasonable thing to say as an external party is "we don't know."