44% of Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted 121
First time accepted submitter RileyWalz (3614865) writes "Twopcharts (a third party website that records and monitors activity on Twitter) is reporting that about 44 percent of all 947 million accounts on Twitter have never posted a single tweet. Of the 550 million users who have tweeted before, 43 percent posted their last tweet over a year ago. And only about 13.3 percent have tweeted in the last 30 days. This could be a sign of many users just signing up and forgetting about their account, or they just prefer reading other's posts. Twitter is not commenting on this data, saying that they do not talk about third-party information related to its service."
Probably typical (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably typical (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what it means is that the majority of accounts are bots, created to increase follower-numbers.
Re:Probably typical (Score:5, Informative)
No, it means both.
Re:Probably typical (Score:5, Interesting)
And a third group people are totally forgetting.... Parents and students where the schools has said it will use Twitter to tell them of emergencies. They get the account solely to receive these notices.
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Who the fuck is stupid enough to agree to something like this? Why not a phone number for personal emergencies or email for broadcast stuff, hell even a plain old SMS would work better.
A 20-year old can be a parent these days.
I think that says enough about why or how social media ever fucking got on the emergency options list. There are a lot of young people out there that communicate no other way, nor have they ever had a need to.
Reminds me a lot of the old AOL days when people thought that shit was the "internet" where everyone searched by keyword.
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I'm curious, when were the days when a 20 year old *couldn't* be a parent?
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1939-1945
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These systems are not meant for personal emergencies. They are meant for situations that have to go out to the whole school population at once. Like weather closing/delays, or that a there is bear prowling the playground, recess is canceled (yes, I really did get a message like this once).
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The school district I work at uses a messaging system which is capable of sending phone calls (pre-recorded or computer generated voice), email, SMS, and twitter. We also contact the local news agencies if the emergency requires it (school closures, etc.). We also use it for attendance calls for students with unexcused absences or tardies. Parents are signed up for phone calls (required at time of registration) and email (if given) by default, but they have to opt in for SMS.
We still have parents who don
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hell even a plain old SMS would work better.
If you set it up properly, you can have twitter send you an SMS whenever a specific users tweets.
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Other than that, I just don't see much call for it.
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news: 44% of Slashdot readers have never posted a single comment.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news: 82% of Slashdot readers have never read a single article.
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In related news 90% of Slashdot Editors don't proofread the summaries before posting articles.
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In other news: 82% of Slashdot readers have never read a single article.
And if you're using slashdot beta, that number drops to a low 101% of the comments.
Why that extra 1%? Why that's because the print function is also in beta and it loses comments before th
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, 100% of facebook users have never booked a face.
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https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Bourne/255438524487203 [facebook.com]
Relevant clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLt7lXDCHQ0 [youtube.com]
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With user IDs well into the millions here, some days I think everybody must post every day.
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This exactly.
If you use a tool like who.unfollowed.me you'll quickly notice a trend that about 50% of the "people" who follow you are doing so only to either make you visit their website, or click on links in their stream, or they message you with spam links. These accounts quickly disappear or stop working after a few days, use photos stolen from other twitter users or from dating sites, and generally are "trash" followers.
The ones that haven't posted a thing are generally people who read-only, have more t
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If a name is a "real name", pay a one time charge by credit/debit card with the same name on it. This would put a green verified box next to the user name. The blue box will continue to be used for identities that twitter staff have verified on their own.
How much longer do you think the twitter staff is going to verify accounts on their own, if they can get people to pay instead?
If your answer to that question is longer than the time it took you to read the question, you're kidding yourself.
If a name is a nickname, pesudo-name, or a business/brand, then the user must mail a business card showing both the brand, twitter handle and name used.This would put a different color icon (maybe violet) that signifies that this has been professionally identified, and clicking on it should show the business card.
All that the latter does is verify that the twitter account is associated with the brand and not the reverse of the user verifying their name.
No. All it does is verify that the user had enough money to get one business card printed and mailed to Twitter.
Re:Probably typical (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a third type of person who never tweets. One that essentially uses Twitter as an RSS feed, news aggregator, and/or joke-a-day (or joke-a-five-minutes) feed. They could still be considered "active" users, in that they use the service, but don't feel the need to post.
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But, curiously enough, they're indistinguishable from the bots.
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But, curiously enough, they're indistinguishable from the bots.
Not really, as a bot by definition isn't a person.
People who sign up for Twitter and use it a as a news source or whatever are still getting something out of it.
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I meant to imply "when reading these marketing stats from the server end." As-in: the figures that the advertisers are paying for.
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I use it this way and cannot see any other use for it.
Want to send me a message? Try email, SMS, skype.G+ and so on. Even Facebook.
Want to send me a picture - see above...
I see no other use for a 140 character max message than to replace the RSS feed
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this is completely me. I have three people I follow. 1) My wife. She logged in and followed herself on my account. 2) a band I like 3) DDO (D&D MMO) because it tells me when there are special deals, because I think that their normal prices are too high, but I enjoy the game. I never post. I just check every once in a while to see if they have posted anything interesting recently.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3)
Can someone explain to me in a sentence or two how and why Twitter is useful? I've had an account for many years, but every time I log in to check, it just looks like a mess. And yet there are millions of people who (apparently) think it's awesome, so I must be doing something wrong.
I would love to hear some examples of how others have found Twitter useful.
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You mean those hot women that are following me are not real?!
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Why can't it just mean they want to follow tweets but no make their own? I don't do twitter, but this sounds suspiciously like the elitist arguments that used to be on usenet or some bulletin board systems, where readers who didn't post were given insulting names like "lurkers".
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Why is this modded as "troll"? The points raised are valid. How many accounts have you lot created on the billion sites and how many are actually used?
I don't think he deserved troll at all, but I do think he is mistaken. Not about the dead accounts, they obviously exists in great volume, but the assumption that these are counted in quoted user numbers. Almost all large online services, and third party statistic sites like Comscore, use "logged in at least once last month" as the metric for their user count. Where there is inflation in user numbers are when multi-service companies are making sure that users that intended to go to one service also "visits"
Re:Probably typical (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people are consumers of tweets. They follow people, click through their links / updates etc. If you look at forums and other community media, you'll see that getting >10% of users to contribute is actually VERY good.
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I have a twitter account and have never posted, a facebook account and never posted, a youtube and + account and never posed, xda account, yahoo groups, etc. I doubt I've posted on /. in years, but I still read every day. I'm a consumer. And to me these are more news services then social interactions. I post to reddit often, but usually drunk and those accounts don't last long...
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That's something to be grateful about. Most of the ones who do tweet have precious little to say, so if the rest joined in the signal would be buried even deeper in the noise.
Re:Probably typical (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't need to tweet for twitter to be useful. Many people follow others or use it to keep on top of things. For example, if there is a minor earthquake somewhere there is no better place to really find out what happened quickly than twitter. "Holy crap, #EARTHQUAKE, shook the building for 30 seconds"
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You can count me in that category. I signed up way back in 2008 because after getting out of college, prospective employers would demand if I had a FB/MySpace/Twitter account, and if not, the interview was up, as the HR rep felt that it was mandatory for anyone in IT to have social networking accounts to be considered up to date in skills.
So, I created a Twitter account, followed EMC and a few other names, and called it done... it did make the bean counters happy because they thought I was "with it".
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I'm sort of in that category. I got my actual name, but my only tweets (~200 of them) are actually from a russian hacker/spammer that generously disappeared and left my account intact.
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Same with Facebook. I have one throwaway facebook account for just about every damn application or website that makes me "log in / sign up using facebook" - and in each case I promptly forget my username and password and never log in again.
I imagine that's more typical than those companies care to admit.
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I'm a big user of Twitter and, yes, have even been known to post photos of my food from time to time. (Most times, the photo is used to illustrate a specific point, not just "Having my usual oatmeal.")
That being said, there are some trends on Twitter that make even me shake my head. To name two, there's the "sock" photos where guys post photos of themselves wearing nothing but a sock. (No, not on their feet.) Ostensibly, this is to raise money to fight testicular cancer, but you'll never see me posting
Too easy (Score:5, Funny)
I wish the other 56% didn't either.
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The 44% are the better (near) half of Twitter, keeping hope alive ^^
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If my calculations are correct, there is a 50/50 chance of a twit being a twat.
Not bad, actually (Score:2)
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I bet there's a huge amount of dummy accounts in almost all websites. If you flip this around and look that 56% have said something, that's pretty good.
Depending on what's meant by "dummy account," I estimate approximately 100% fall into that category. ;o)
BTW, how many twats would a Twitter twat tweet if a Twitter twat could tweet twats?
I wonder (Score:1)
What percentage of slashdot accounts have never commented? Probably much lower because of AC here, but I bet there are quite a few. For example, I think I made an account here one drunken night, but I have never used it.
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Finding correlation where there is none (Score:2)
Somehow the report of '44% of twitter accounts have never been used' has been morphed by the reporter into '44% of twitter users have never posted'.
I know people with multiple Twitter accounts, separation between business and pleasure accounts... some just to follow others without sticking their nose above the parapet (and are never tweeted from), some for larks, some for business.
44% of Twitter accounts != 44% of Twitter users.
The original poster has read some report on the internet and inferred meaning w
And 99% never posted anything interesting (Score:3)
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Yep, this has been true of every web service I've been involved with, all the way back to the BBS days. 90% of users are consumers and only about 10% actually contribute anything. Twitters numbers look pretty good, actually.
but... but... butt.... (Score:1)
I only signed up to see the tweet from Kim saying she had to buy two airplane seats because she couldn't get her fat ass into the seat or when her sister had to pay extra baggage fees for that melon on top of her head since it was considered a carry-on item.
This is nothing when compared... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hate to break it to you, but you didn't deserve the job.
Your nagios config was broken, and if you were using some SMS service that batched the messages, your choice of providers was broken.
How did your boss get the alert ... oh thats right ... by using a reliable message delivery platform instead of an unreliable one.
Read your post again, and continue to re-read it until you understand why it 'cost you a job'
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And on facebook... (Score:2)
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I'd think there's enough consensus out there to say that there's never been anything of value on Facebook.
It's a good service (Score:3)
Many people think that Twitter is some hipster bullshit, and I was somewhat in the same boat before. But when I slapped a Twitter client to the side of my desktop and subscribed to a bunch of cool tech guys and some news agencies, I really started to enjoy the stuff. The perfect way to stay updated to world events in easily digestible small capsules. Also much better platform to discuss nerdy stuff than Facebook.
Now only waiting for the angry AC to call me a Twitter shill.
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I have never "tweeted" but I do follow a few blogs, individuals, events, etc.
The twitter feed itself doesn't provide much information but the links are usually valuable.
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Hey, that's still better than /r/politics. There you will be modded down if you don't sound angry enough when you post.
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Slashdot was the place to get modded down for going against the hive mind, before Reddit made getting modded down for going against the hive mind cool.
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Here's why I did so. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I did something similar. I signed up for the twitter account in order to follow a handful of others, and get event results (not all of which I am interested in). Of some use is an education account I follow for occasional tips learning a foreign language.
I think twitter is great for "one to many" information dissemination.
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Similar story here. I signed up to be able to truthfully claim that I was familiar with Twitter for a job application. I looked at the user interface and I knew enough to talk about it if asked. Never posted, never followed, never went back.
No kidding (Score:3)
And when I see (usually in the news) posts from other twitters, it makes me wish the other 46% would do the same.
There is very little you can constructively say in just 140 characters. Twitter is great for only very specific scenarios such as status reports, quick facts, quick questions or witty one-liners.
Everything else is just inanity from people who think the more exclamation marks you use at the end of a sentence, the more seriously you should take their statement.
The sole reason I set up an account was so I could follow a couple of local restaurants because they post useful things like their daily specials. And that ST:TNG S8 guy. Too bad he stopped writing new plot synopses.
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Don't you mean the other 56%?
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Oh bloody hell... Durr... I good math! I got an F for Fantastic! :P
Short comments please. (Score:2)
Will everyone commenting to this please do so in at most 140 characters. Thank you.
Et Ceteri (Score:1)
And I wish more of the remaining 56% would follow suit...
Business model impact... (Score:1)
What Twitter IS Good For (Score:3)
I use Twitter and it does have some uses, and I tell the family and friends that it's useful for...
* Breaking news (it's like a wire-service for the masses);
* Closely following a product/celebrity/athlete/event/sport;
* Posting a short question on a specific topic via #;
* Posting or finding witticisms and satire;
* Posting or finding a status report (not viable to foster a discussion by any means); and
* Finding spam, click-bait, impersonators of real people, bots, pr0n, and completely inaccurate information.
I mainly use Twitter myself to follow athletes in the NFL (primarily my team, Green Bay) and the three forms of motorsport I watch: NASCAR, Formula 1, and IndyCar. I really like Twitter during one of these sporting events because posters can give you more detail/insight into the event or people involved than just the TV or radio broadcasters (Example: sideline/pit reporters or members of a team participating in the event who can tweet during the event.)
IMHO though, the spam/bots/clickbait is out of control and detracts from the platform.
Twitter sounds like a lame idea (Score:2)
I could care less about "oh pasta here is so good" tweets from some celeb. I'm in that 44% and I set up an account just to hold my name.
Count me among the 44% (Score:2)
I signed up for Twitter as soon as it went public to preserve my name. However, I have yet to issue a single Tweet and only follow less than a handful of people I selected years ago. If I ever see the value of Twitter, I might tweet one day.
Which is worse? (Score:1)
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