[dossy]

> "(Again, caveat emptor: these are non-random samples, and likely not representative of Twitter’s estimates!)"

Why would you not just take a random sample, instead of cherry-picking scenarios that are guaranteed to be affected by selection bias?

So unfortunate.

[teratau]

The difficulty is, how would you take a random sample when you don’t know who is a monetizable daily active user or not? Twitter can do this, but third parties can’t. They can only take random samples of people who tweet, people who follow, etc.

[dossy]

> [...] you don’t know who is a monetizable daily active user [...]

That is some real BS gerrymandering on the part of Twitter.

Accounts that are not "monetizable daily active users" who spam and harass users on the service don't count?

Of course they count.

Just generate random numbers from 1 to 2^64 and use the "/users/show" API by user_id until you've got 100 successful hits that match a valid user, then once you have 100, score the users.

Do you get fewer than 5 out of 100 spam bots? That should be the test.

[tlb]

The point is that Twitter charges their advertisers, their source of revenue, according to ad impressions served to "monetizable" users. They don't necessarily know at the time of serving the ad whether they're monetizable -- they might figure it out later. But advertisers are trusting them to not charge them for bots (or no more than 5% bots).

It could well be that 50% of accounts are bots, but as long as Twitter doesn't charge advertisers for them, they've been honest. But if their mDAU counts have been way off, advertisers will demand their money back.

[dossy]

Sure, I get the practical reason why Twitter is focused on that specific subset, but I think Elon's point is, as a user of the service, the quality of the service is directly negatively affected by the number of bots and spam on the service, and if Twitter's not motivated to properly attend to the problem "because it doesn't affect monetization" then that's a big problem when you're looking holistically at the platform as a product from the user value perspective.

If you want to get users to pay for the service, then you have to improve the product for the users, not for the advertisers.

And, to that end, the question of whether the service is being ruined by an abundance of bots and spam, regardless of whether it's negatively impacting _advertisers_, is a real issue if you're looking to acquire the business.