Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Timshel 1501 days ago
Probably forced to since they do not have access to login information. Especially since if you do not post but login you are certainly not a spammer ^^, could still be bot crawling.

But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that less 50% of US users tweet five times a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75% as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using survey I believe so should include only active users and no spam/bot.

So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that the 25% less active users might not even post every two month (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back a quarter of the 80% they found as active.

Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example, but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done some good work ;).