6 ms·

Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet

87 points by antonius 12y ago

dm2 12y ago
I have never send a tweet and just use it as a news feed. Is there anything wrong with that?
- x5315 12y ago
  Nope.
tzaman 12y ago
By the way, is it any easier to get a handle that's inactive for like 7 years?
- nchlswu 12y ago
  I don't think they've introduced any process. Until then the account has to be truly inactive and you have to know someone at Twitter
- robin_reala 12y ago
  Is it that difficult? I got @kyan released for my company after several years of inactivity through a simple request, although I suppose it helped that we also own kyan.com and could prove we were actively branding ourselves as Kyan.
  - tzaman 12y ago
    How did you start the process?
    - robin_reala 12y ago
      I actually filled in the trademark form ( https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/topics/236-twitter-rules-policies/articles/18367-trademark-policy https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/to... ) even though we were just branded as Kyan and not officially trademarked as such. I seem to recall from the help documentation somewhere that an account that hasn’t tweeted in the last six months is more likely to be up for grabs in this way, although I can’t find that reference now. Either way a couple of confirmations were all it took to move from @kyanmedia to @kyan.
  - uptown 12y ago
    Do you hold the trademark? I've found they're unwilling to listen unless you can back it up with a registered trademark.
    - robin_reala 12y ago
      I don’t believe we hold any registered trademark. We’d been branding ourselves as simply Kyan for over 5 years before gaining the Twitter handle, although our registered company name is Kyanmedia (which was our previous handle). The account had a few followers and a profile picture uploaded, but either had never tweeted or was private.
joosters 12y ago
My account is one of those 44%. I have nothing to say on Twitter, but having an account lets me follow the people that I want to. This still makes me an active user, though.
- valevk 12y ago
  Yes, that's exactly my situation. On the outside it looks like you are not active, but actually you are regularly on twitter. Unfortunately, there is no way to measure this case, except for counting the people you follow or the people who are following you. Then you could know whether that user is somewhat active.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    Couldn't Twitter track how many times you "request" your feed? Although not perfect, I'm sure they could get an approximation of those users who are just "lurking". They could also track logins from the web side, and probably app usage. This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
    - joosters 12y ago
      Twitter definitely could, and they can easily get a clear idea of how many of these 'zero tweet' accounts actually are active. However, Twitter have no reason to give this information out and there are not many ways for outsiders to discover this information.
      - talmand 12y ago
        There would be many business reasons to not release such information.
- p-pat-ni 12y ago
  Exactly, doesn't matter if someone tweets or not. Its the active user that matters..
- 12y ago
spilk 12y ago
I've created several accounts just for API access for various purposes. I wonder how many of those non-tweeters are dummy accounts for developers.
swasheck 12y ago
with the amount of crap that the 56% spews, can you imagine the drivel overload if more of those 44% actually released their "thoughts" into the air? also: who cares?
mathattack 12y ago
This makes a lot of sense. For most users, it's a 1 way communication. Most of the 56% don't say a lot either. It's become very much a vehicle for people with things to promote.
jere 12y ago
Being a nobody on twitter can be extremely frustrating if you're tweeting and expecting anyone to pay attention. I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I'm not surprised users avoid tweeting. There's kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.
- natdempk 12y ago
  I think think the thing about Twitter is you essentially have to pretend you have a network to actually gain a network. You have to do the internet equivalent of putting yourself out there, because if someone gets to your profile and sees you have no tweets, they probably won't follow you. Its definitely a Catch-22 scenario, but things like retweeting and favoriting can help you build that network without doing stuff that feels too weird. Also using Twitter as a networking tool on top of real life is definitely helpful, as people you meet in real life will probably be more willing to engage with you on Twitter.
- wsc981 12y ago
  > Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. This is actually one of the 2 reasons why I use Twitter: - following interesting people (like John Carmack) - keeping a "diary" of interesting links on a variety of subjects
- tombrossman 12y ago
  This is a bit of a tangent but why allow spam bots to appear in your followers list? I too have about a hundred followers and I vet every single new follower. I take offense at any spammer that thinks they can just slip in there and be accepted, and I don't want potential new followers to look at my profile and see a bunch of obvious spammers. This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam. Quality over quantity, always.
qwerta 12y ago
I have a question: If there is an dead account which never had any sort activity, is there some legal/moral way to get its username? I would like to buy it, but owner does not respond. There is also no trademark violation, so I can not use official way Twitter handles this cases.
freyr 12y ago
I use Twitter to get news and updates from a few sources. And in this case, the headline is like saying the majority of newspaper readers have never written a newspaper article.
- interpares 12y ago
  That's a great analogy and highlights what might be a core issue for Twitter: what it wants to be (an social network with lots of two-sided interaction) vs. what its users perceive it to be (a newswire).
- jebus989 12y ago
  Well, a minority in this case. Also I don't think anyone seriously believes 400 million actual people are using twitter in that way.
Touche 12y ago
The "stream" concept only works if you have a lot of followers, which most people do not. For those with < 200 followers the chances if anyone reading your tweet before it falls down the stream is so small that it becomes a waste to even try.
simoneau 12y ago
I assume that some (probably small) proportion of this 44% has used their account for direct messages, DMs, but these can't be detected? Also, how are protected accounts factoring into these stats? I couldn't find a link to the data itself and the article didn't make it clear how these two factors are being handled.
cruise02 12y ago
Considering the 1% rule of Internet culture (only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk), 44% sounds quite good. Sites like Twitter and reddit (and HN, to a lesser degree) probably get a higher proportion of contributing users than your average forum or Q&A site by lowering the barriers to contributing. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...
danmaz74 12y ago
Using twitter just to consume information is perfectly legit
cookerware 12y ago
this is a bit worrying, the news article claims that these are still active users regardless but as far as I know, I get random tweets from bots and strangers promoting their own thing and largely I don't have a very active engagement with Twitter.
simonsarris 12y ago
So far for me there's a single big use-case for twitter, and it's the reason I went from a zero-tweeter to a "gee I should look like a normal, respectable upstanding Twitizen(?)[1]" user. For some very large companies, Twitter is apparently the best/only medium one can use to communicate with them about issues (regardless of how important they are). I've found that when I don't want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I do I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone. It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work. The use case I'd like to use twitter for is trying out some jokes/"deep thoughts", but I don't have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I'll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it's somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody. [1] Wow that's been a word for at least five years. I guess that's not too surprising...
- interpares 12y ago
  Do you add relevant hashtags to your jokes/deep thoughts? That would help them to be discovered by others.
  - simonsarris 12y ago
    For some but I find them super hard to use well and remain funny (funny to me at least). Lame example of hashtag use: > #baseball combines the two things Americans love most: Perfect lawns and arguments in hindsight about the decisions that professionals make. I wrote this, but think it's funnier without the hashtag. With many more I can think of things that I considered really funny, but had no conceivable way of adding hashtags without taking away from the brevity: > I propose we start calling snow plow guys "Storm Troopers" > The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease. Where could I hashtag those up without making them considerably less funny? I think the brevity is required for maximum "impact", and I don't wanna detract by putting a hashtag in the middle, because its the sentence equivalent of stressing a syllable awkwardly. Some people on Twitter have turned this awkward word-stressing into an art. Comedian Rob Delaney comes to mind as an expert in maximizing the awkwardness of it.
bunderbunder 12y ago
I've got less than 100 followers, most of them folks like @ToasterRepairDotCom and @PeoriaJobHunters If I were to start sending tweets, I'd just be the electronic equivalent of the guy who hangs out on a bench in the park near my house muttering under his breath all day.
- freebs 12y ago
  Having conversations with people and not just sending out a single tweet has helped me a little bit.
eksith 12y ago
To add to that, I've seen a fair number of short usernames with few or no followers/following that were created early on. When I couldn't find the ones I wanted, I gave up and used my own name. I think a lot of those accounts were mopped up by folks who then lost interest or forgot their credentials/lost email addresses etc...
sharkweek 12y ago
I use Twitter feverishly (probably too much) - I probably annoy a lot of my followers with non-sequitur commentary and the random news article. But what I REALLY derive value in, is it's my always streaming news source. Follow a dozen or so news sites (both local, world, and niche-focused, such as tech and marketing) and I'm always up to date on what's going on. A well curated Twitter account is going to beat out almost any individual news source. While I do know Twitter botting is a huge issue, I also (anecdotally) know a lot of people who only use Twitter for consumption who have never tweeted anything themselves.
- pknight 12y ago
  I have been wondering what the value is of being continually up to date. One of my gripes with being on twitter is that you get to be up to date on things you don't particularly want to be up to date on. I wish there were an easy way to filter things out.
will_brown 12y ago
A major issue was over looked - twitter @username squatting. For example, I registered www.ameristartup.com a few weeks back. At the exact time I was creating the Facebook page someone else created the @ameristartup twitter account. To date the twitter account has remained inactive (no followers, no following, no tweets, no profile pic, ect...). I naively notified Twitter thinking they would have interest in curbing this type of behavior, but I received the form corporate response of f-off.
pinaceae 12y ago
It is the best RSS replacement. Let's me follow a lot of good sources, across multiple platforms. And not just sites, but individual, interesting people. The DM feature? You can only message followers, kinda useless.
- rschmitty 12y ago
  Twitter a terrible RSS replacement. With RSS I just got the news/blog posts I care about, nothing more. Following people on twitter I get some good links but mostly a lot of noise about personal life crap I really don't care. Normally I stop following someone if the valuable links to noise ratio gets too low. #notinterestedinwhereyouaredrinkingtonight
  - smackfu 12y ago
    There's a neat feature in iPhone Safari. If you pull up the bookmarks page, there's an @ sign at the top, and that lists just tweets that have links in them.
  - pinaceae 12y ago
    then follow sites. lots of them now have twitter feeds. see @daringfireball vs. @gruber. or the various @HN feeds.
    - Touche 12y ago
      So what do you do when you aren't looking at Twitter in the timespan in which it appears in your feed? Just never see those articles?
      - nnkh 12y ago
        The same thing you do with RSS/Atom feeds. They don’t magically disappear unless they’re deleted. If you mean you think they would get buried under regular human tweets, you can make a list. I have a news list for this.
josefresco 12y ago
To spin this positively, Twitter should be happy their platform is considered a "medium" and not just "one-thing" to all users. The idea that your Twitter feed is an unfiltered firehose, and that you can use Twitter how you want (follow, tweet, or not) makes it all the more powerful and redundant to shifting consumer trends. As long as Twitter doesn't hork the various tools/services used to access the service, no one should "get sick" or be fatigued by Twitter as there is not one standard experience. A family member of mine just signed up for Twitter but didn't want anyone to know for various reasons (they are not interested in gaining a "following"). They just wanted to follow a few folks/entities they're interested in and that's it. This is a good thing ... Twitter remains "useful" without dictating how my family member and others has to use it. The "hands-off" approach should also appeal to businesses looking to partner with, or provide tie-ins to the Twitter service. I would argue the more lightweight and open-ended Twitter is in regards to how it works, the better.
swalsh 12y ago
I have twitter, i find it useful. I follow local beer and burger guys. They always come up with great spots I've never been. Very useful. I also follow CEO's, which is also very informative. Its rare I feel the need to tweet myself, but that doesn't make me a less active user.
sreejithr 12y ago
Of course. Twitter is more of a media-consumption platform.
ryandrake 12y ago
The old keeps being new again. Every time someone tries to create a new platform that will finally open up the Internet to the long-standing promise of widespread two-way communications, the same thing keeps happening: The platform turns into a broadcast medium where a few use it to promote something and the vast majority sit back and consume. BBS systems, E-mail, USENET, almost all message boards, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can change the protocol, make it Web-2.0, limit it to 140 characters, add AJAX, but you can't change human nature.
digikata 12y ago
There's still a use case for non-sending accounts. Compared to email Twitter is a nicer way to receive promotional info. Senders are forced the keep their messages short, and there's no management time needed on the receivers part. I wish email headers would have a promotional & auto-delete/expire date tag for emails (of course it wouldn't work as companies would ignore it...).
huangc10 12y ago
I believe this.
synfin80 12y ago
I'd be interested in how many of the ones that have sent tweets were from hijacked accounts.
luos 12y ago
In my country noone uses twitter I know. I only used it once to message Digital Ocean why are they so slow. It worked out better than I expected, they responded in 5 mins and I could see others with the same problem. Other than that I really don't know why would I use it. I think for me reddit multis are the perfect solution.
Pxtl 12y ago
The other 56% are spammers.
Pxtl 12y ago
For me, Twitter works for hyper-local things. All the local media personalities live-tweet council meetings and the like, local politicians and businesses have active twitter accounts. It's great for contacting the public face of something in a fashion that makes it impossible to handle the matter privately. Every business or elected-official is super-gracious and accommodating on Twitter because the world is watching.
KrisAndrew 12y ago
I gave up on Twitter several months ago. I never really got much out of it. I also quit using G+ after I stopped playing Ingress. Facebook is time-limited to 1 minute per day using the StayFocusd extension in my browser. I've also created email filters that send all social network notifications to the trash. And that's the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it's far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail). There's a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they've discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn't easily dismantled by a filter.
nextstep 12y ago
And those accounts have all the good usernames :(
brc 12y ago
So this looks like a powerlaw curve with a fat head and a short tail. I don't see this as a big deal - this means that 56% of people have engaged with a service. I think most people would be happy with that.
nilkn 12y ago
I don't even understand how to get started with Twitter. I might know like one person in real life who actively tweets. My only real exposure to Twitter "in real life" is through using it to post status updates/outages.
XorNot 12y ago
I have a twitter account which uses my 'real' name spelling purely for the purposes of squatting on the name.
Istof 12y ago
How many of the 13% of the twitter accounts that wrote at least 100 tweets are "robots"?

87 points by antonius 12y ago

dm2 12y ago

I have never send a tweet and just use it as a news feed. Is there anything wrong with that?

x5315 12y ago
Nope.

tzaman 12y ago

By the way, is it any easier to get a handle that's inactive for like 7 years?

nchlswu 12y ago
I don't think they've introduced any process. Until then the account has to be truly inactive and you have to know someone at Twitter
robin_reala 12y ago
Is it that difficult? I got @kyan released for my company after several years of inactivity through a simple request, although I suppose it helped that we also own kyan.com and could prove we were actively branding ourselves as Kyan.
- tzaman 12y ago
  How did you start the process?
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    I actually filled in the trademark form ( https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/topics/236-twitter-rules-policies/articles/18367-trademark-policy https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/to... ) even though we were just branded as Kyan and not officially trademarked as such. I seem to recall from the help documentation somewhere that an account that hasn’t tweeted in the last six months is more likely to be up for grabs in this way, although I can’t find that reference now. Either way a couple of confirmations were all it took to move from @kyanmedia to @kyan.
- uptown 12y ago
  Do you hold the trademark? I've found they're unwilling to listen unless you can back it up with a registered trademark.
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    I don’t believe we hold any registered trademark. We’d been branding ourselves as simply Kyan for over 5 years before gaining the Twitter handle, although our registered company name is Kyanmedia (which was our previous handle). The account had a few followers and a profile picture uploaded, but either had never tweeted or was private.

joosters 12y ago

My account is one of those 44%. I have nothing to say on Twitter, but having an account lets me follow the people that I want to. This still makes me an active user, though.

valevk 12y ago
Yes, that's exactly my situation. On the outside it looks like you are not active, but actually you are regularly on twitter. Unfortunately, there is no way to measure this case, except for counting the people you follow or the people who are following you. Then you could know whether that user is somewhat active.
- josefresco 12y ago
  Couldn't Twitter track how many times you "request" your feed? Although not perfect, I'm sure they could get an approximation of those users who are just "lurking". They could also track logins from the web side, and probably app usage. This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
  - joosters 12y ago
    Twitter definitely could, and they can easily get a clear idea of how many of these 'zero tweet' accounts actually are active. However, Twitter have no reason to give this information out and there are not many ways for outsiders to discover this information.
    - talmand 12y ago
      There would be many business reasons to not release such information.
p-pat-ni 12y ago
Exactly, doesn't matter if someone tweets or not. Its the active user that matters..
12y ago

spilk 12y ago

I've created several accounts just for API access for various purposes. I wonder how many of those non-tweeters are dummy accounts for developers.

swasheck 12y ago

with the amount of crap that the 56% spews, can you imagine the drivel overload if more of those 44% actually released their "thoughts" into the air? also: who cares?

mathattack 12y ago

This makes a lot of sense. For most users, it's a 1 way communication. Most of the 56% don't say a lot either. It's become very much a vehicle for people with things to promote.

jere 12y ago

Being a nobody on twitter can be extremely frustrating if you're tweeting and expecting anyone to pay attention. I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I'm not surprised users avoid tweeting. There's kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.

natdempk 12y ago
I think think the thing about Twitter is you essentially have to pretend you have a network to actually gain a network. You have to do the internet equivalent of putting yourself out there, because if someone gets to your profile and sees you have no tweets, they probably won't follow you. Its definitely a Catch-22 scenario, but things like retweeting and favoriting can help you build that network without doing stuff that feels too weird. Also using Twitter as a networking tool on top of real life is definitely helpful, as people you meet in real life will probably be more willing to engage with you on Twitter.
wsc981 12y ago
> Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. This is actually one of the 2 reasons why I use Twitter: - following interesting people (like John Carmack) - keeping a "diary" of interesting links on a variety of subjects
tombrossman 12y ago
This is a bit of a tangent but why allow spam bots to appear in your followers list? I too have about a hundred followers and I vet every single new follower. I take offense at any spammer that thinks they can just slip in there and be accepted, and I don't want potential new followers to look at my profile and see a bunch of obvious spammers. This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam. Quality over quantity, always.

qwerta 12y ago

I have a question: If there is an dead account which never had any sort activity, is there some legal/moral way to get its username? I would like to buy it, but owner does not respond. There is also no trademark violation, so I can not use official way Twitter handles this cases.

freyr 12y ago

I use Twitter to get news and updates from a few sources. And in this case, the headline is like saying the majority of newspaper readers have never written a newspaper article.

interpares 12y ago
That's a great analogy and highlights what might be a core issue for Twitter: what it wants to be (an social network with lots of two-sided interaction) vs. what its users perceive it to be (a newswire).
jebus989 12y ago
Well, a minority in this case. Also I don't think anyone seriously believes 400 million actual people are using twitter in that way.

Touche 12y ago

The "stream" concept only works if you have a lot of followers, which most people do not. For those with < 200 followers the chances if anyone reading your tweet before it falls down the stream is so small that it becomes a waste to even try.

simoneau 12y ago

I assume that some (probably small) proportion of this 44% has used their account for direct messages, DMs, but these can't be detected? Also, how are protected accounts factoring into these stats? I couldn't find a link to the data itself and the article didn't make it clear how these two factors are being handled.

cruise02 12y ago

Considering the 1% rule of Internet culture (only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk), 44% sounds quite good. Sites like Twitter and reddit (and HN, to a lesser degree) probably get a higher proportion of contributing users than your average forum or Q&A site by lowering the barriers to contributing. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...

danmaz74 12y ago

Using twitter just to consume information is perfectly legit

cookerware 12y ago

this is a bit worrying, the news article claims that these are still active users regardless but as far as I know, I get random tweets from bots and strangers promoting their own thing and largely I don't have a very active engagement with Twitter.

simonsarris 12y ago

So far for me there's a single big use-case for twitter, and it's the reason I went from a zero-tweeter to a "gee I should look like a normal, respectable upstanding Twitizen(?)[1]" user. For some very large companies, Twitter is apparently the best/only medium one can use to communicate with them about issues (regardless of how important they are). I've found that when I don't want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I do I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone. It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work. The use case I'd like to use twitter for is trying out some jokes/"deep thoughts", but I don't have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I'll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it's somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody. [1] Wow that's been a word for at least five years. I guess that's not too surprising...

interpares 12y ago
Do you add relevant hashtags to your jokes/deep thoughts? That would help them to be discovered by others.
- simonsarris 12y ago
  For some but I find them super hard to use well and remain funny (funny to me at least). Lame example of hashtag use: > #baseball combines the two things Americans love most: Perfect lawns and arguments in hindsight about the decisions that professionals make. I wrote this, but think it's funnier without the hashtag. With many more I can think of things that I considered really funny, but had no conceivable way of adding hashtags without taking away from the brevity: > I propose we start calling snow plow guys "Storm Troopers" > The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease. Where could I hashtag those up without making them considerably less funny? I think the brevity is required for maximum "impact", and I don't wanna detract by putting a hashtag in the middle, because its the sentence equivalent of stressing a syllable awkwardly. Some people on Twitter have turned this awkward word-stressing into an art. Comedian Rob Delaney comes to mind as an expert in maximizing the awkwardness of it.

bunderbunder 12y ago

I've got less than 100 followers, most of them folks like @ToasterRepairDotCom and @PeoriaJobHunters If I were to start sending tweets, I'd just be the electronic equivalent of the guy who hangs out on a bench in the park near my house muttering under his breath all day.

freebs 12y ago
Having conversations with people and not just sending out a single tweet has helped me a little bit.

eksith 12y ago

To add to that, I've seen a fair number of short usernames with few or no followers/following that were created early on. When I couldn't find the ones I wanted, I gave up and used my own name. I think a lot of those accounts were mopped up by folks who then lost interest or forgot their credentials/lost email addresses etc...

sharkweek 12y ago

I use Twitter feverishly (probably too much) - I probably annoy a lot of my followers with non-sequitur commentary and the random news article. But what I REALLY derive value in, is it's my always streaming news source. Follow a dozen or so news sites (both local, world, and niche-focused, such as tech and marketing) and I'm always up to date on what's going on. A well curated Twitter account is going to beat out almost any individual news source. While I do know Twitter botting is a huge issue, I also (anecdotally) know a lot of people who only use Twitter for consumption who have never tweeted anything themselves.

pknight 12y ago
I have been wondering what the value is of being continually up to date. One of my gripes with being on twitter is that you get to be up to date on things you don't particularly want to be up to date on. I wish there were an easy way to filter things out.

will_brown 12y ago

A major issue was over looked - twitter @username squatting. For example, I registered www.ameristartup.com a few weeks back. At the exact time I was creating the Facebook page someone else created the @ameristartup twitter account. To date the twitter account has remained inactive (no followers, no following, no tweets, no profile pic, ect...). I naively notified Twitter thinking they would have interest in curbing this type of behavior, but I received the form corporate response of f-off.

pinaceae 12y ago

It is the best RSS replacement. Let's me follow a lot of good sources, across multiple platforms. And not just sites, but individual, interesting people. The DM feature? You can only message followers, kinda useless.

rschmitty 12y ago
Twitter a terrible RSS replacement. With RSS I just got the news/blog posts I care about, nothing more. Following people on twitter I get some good links but mostly a lot of noise about personal life crap I really don't care. Normally I stop following someone if the valuable links to noise ratio gets too low. #notinterestedinwhereyouaredrinkingtonight
- smackfu 12y ago
  There's a neat feature in iPhone Safari. If you pull up the bookmarks page, there's an @ sign at the top, and that lists just tweets that have links in them.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  then follow sites. lots of them now have twitter feeds. see @daringfireball vs. @gruber. or the various @HN feeds.
  - Touche 12y ago
    So what do you do when you aren't looking at Twitter in the timespan in which it appears in your feed? Just never see those articles?
    - nnkh 12y ago
      The same thing you do with RSS/Atom feeds. They don’t magically disappear unless they’re deleted. If you mean you think they would get buried under regular human tweets, you can make a list. I have a news list for this.

josefresco 12y ago

To spin this positively, Twitter should be happy their platform is considered a "medium" and not just "one-thing" to all users. The idea that your Twitter feed is an unfiltered firehose, and that you can use Twitter how you want (follow, tweet, or not) makes it all the more powerful and redundant to shifting consumer trends. As long as Twitter doesn't hork the various tools/services used to access the service, no one should "get sick" or be fatigued by Twitter as there is not one standard experience. A family member of mine just signed up for Twitter but didn't want anyone to know for various reasons (they are not interested in gaining a "following"). They just wanted to follow a few folks/entities they're interested in and that's it. This is a good thing ... Twitter remains "useful" without dictating how my family member and others has to use it. The "hands-off" approach should also appeal to businesses looking to partner with, or provide tie-ins to the Twitter service. I would argue the more lightweight and open-ended Twitter is in regards to how it works, the better.

swalsh 12y ago

I have twitter, i find it useful. I follow local beer and burger guys. They always come up with great spots I've never been. Very useful. I also follow CEO's, which is also very informative. Its rare I feel the need to tweet myself, but that doesn't make me a less active user.

sreejithr 12y ago

Of course. Twitter is more of a media-consumption platform.

ryandrake 12y ago

The old keeps being new again. Every time someone tries to create a new platform that will finally open up the Internet to the long-standing promise of widespread two-way communications, the same thing keeps happening: The platform turns into a broadcast medium where a few use it to promote something and the vast majority sit back and consume. BBS systems, E-mail, USENET, almost all message boards, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can change the protocol, make it Web-2.0, limit it to 140 characters, add AJAX, but you can't change human nature.

digikata 12y ago

There's still a use case for non-sending accounts. Compared to email Twitter is a nicer way to receive promotional info. Senders are forced the keep their messages short, and there's no management time needed on the receivers part. I wish email headers would have a promotional & auto-delete/expire date tag for emails (of course it wouldn't work as companies would ignore it...).

huangc10 12y ago

I believe this.

synfin80 12y ago

I'd be interested in how many of the ones that have sent tweets were from hijacked accounts.

luos 12y ago

In my country noone uses twitter I know. I only used it once to message Digital Ocean why are they so slow. It worked out better than I expected, they responded in 5 mins and I could see others with the same problem. Other than that I really don't know why would I use it. I think for me reddit multis are the perfect solution.

Pxtl 12y ago

The other 56% are spammers.

Pxtl 12y ago

For me, Twitter works for hyper-local things. All the local media personalities live-tweet council meetings and the like, local politicians and businesses have active twitter accounts. It's great for contacting the public face of something in a fashion that makes it impossible to handle the matter privately. Every business or elected-official is super-gracious and accommodating on Twitter because the world is watching.

KrisAndrew 12y ago

I gave up on Twitter several months ago. I never really got much out of it. I also quit using G+ after I stopped playing Ingress. Facebook is time-limited to 1 minute per day using the StayFocusd extension in my browser. I've also created email filters that send all social network notifications to the trash. And that's the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it's far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail). There's a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they've discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn't easily dismantled by a filter.

nextstep 12y ago

And those accounts have all the good usernames :(

brc 12y ago

So this looks like a powerlaw curve with a fat head and a short tail. I don't see this as a big deal - this means that 56% of people have engaged with a service. I think most people would be happy with that.

nilkn 12y ago

I don't even understand how to get started with Twitter. I might know like one person in real life who actively tweets. My only real exposure to Twitter "in real life" is through using it to post status updates/outages.

XorNot 12y ago

I have a twitter account which uses my 'real' name spelling purely for the purposes of squatting on the name.

Istof 12y ago

How many of the 13% of the twitter accounts that wrote at least 100 tweets are "robots"?