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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Twitter is an obvious exception to this. Same for Substack, Reddit, Facebook, and blogs. It's not that video has taken over the internet , but video has consumed the attention of those who are receptive to it.

TikTok is poised to overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture. Facebook and Reddit both let you post videos. Substack, tumblr, and other blogs are an increasingly irrelevant fraction.

In order for TikTok to "overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture". Twitter would first have to be the main wellspring of culture, which I find difficult to believe. While Intellectually I recognize they must exist, I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly.

You definitely have, see the mau chart.

I don't believe that chart proves as much as you think it does. If we assume for the sake of argument that every single one of those 70 million north American accounts corresponds to a real live flesh and blood person. IE that the number of bots, corporate PR accounts, and users operating multiple accounts on Twitter is 0. That works out to a little under 1 in 5 people, or around 18% of the combined population of the US and Canada. In contrast creationists are estimated to be around 30% of the population. How many creationists do you know?

Of course thing is that while the number of bots on Twitter is in dispute, we know for a fact that that a substantial portion of Twitter accounts are official corporate PR, and that a lot of people have multiple accounts so that estimate of 1 in 5 people or 18% of the population is almost certainly overgenerous.

I was specifically rebutting the " I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly." claim. Obviously a MAU chart proves nothing about 'wellspring of culture', as the creationist example, or something like 'red tribe', 'christians', 'reality tv fans', 'old people' - all of which have large populations yet aren't culturally dominant - nicely shows.

and I'm pointing out that it's not much of a rebuttal, for instance that 18% of the population (if we're feeling overgenerous) might be concentrated in a specific geographic area. Likewise "cultural dominance" is a difficult measure. IE Gamergate is really big deal amongst a certain subset of the extremely online left, and has been characterized by a number of different users here as "the most culturally significant event of the last two decades" but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the general population knew or cared anything about it. Publishers sleeping with and/or buying off reviewers oh you sweet summer child this has been the norm since the 19th century.

I suspect lotsa lotsa botsa there. No way almost every fourth American (excluding kids too young to know what Twitter is) is an active twitter user.

"MAU" is an industry term that means something like 'people who have used the service in some way in the past month', like, if you have an account and went to twitter.com at some point. It doesn't mean 'number of people who have a twitter account and actively post'.

From twitter's most recent financial report

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. Average mDAU for a period represents thenumber of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period.

(mDAU is monetizable daily active user, not monthly active user - "In Q2 2019, Twitter discontinued publishing MAU figures in favor of figures regarding monetizable daily active users (mDAU)")

Worldwide - "Average monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) was 217 million for the three months ended December 31, 2021, an increase of 13% year over year.". In the US - ". In the three months endedDecember 31, 2021, we had 38 million average mDAU in the United States".

For the monthly active user number - afaict, all that requires is 1) have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month. It makes sense that 1/4 of americans do that.

Oddly, this means I'm not counted as a mDAU, despite spending at least an hour on twitter.com today. And most of that was w/o adblock.

Anyway even if for the sake of argument it's 1/4 that, that's still 1/16th of all americans, meaning HIynka has interacted with many of them

I don't think most of those are bots.

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com,

That includes every bot that logs in at least once a day, and pro-rated count of every bot that logs in less frequently.

  1. have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month

Once per month would only give 1/30: "number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days". If you go once a months, that's 1/30 on average mDAU. And no, even that doesn't make any sense for 1/4 of Americans. 1/4 of people living in a posh neighborhood of San Francisco, maybe, but that's not everybody in America.

I do not see any mention of the filtering of the data to exclude bots, and I imagine they have zero incentive to do this - most casual readers would assume it's "number of people using Twitter", and for the litigious types there is actual definition that covers their asses. I think this number however is grossly inflated and actual people constitute maybe 1/10, maybe even 1/100 of that number. Maybe even less, who knows.

Once per month would only give 1/30: "number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days

To be clear, I was referring to "monthly active users", as per that chart, which is different from daily active users, as described above.

My quote came from here, linked above

The mention of bot filtering is here, page 7:

Furthermore, our metrics may be impacted by our information quality efforts, which are our overall efforts toreduce malicious activity on the service, inclusive of spam, malicious automation, and fake accounts. For example, there are a number of false or spam accountsin existence on our platform. We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during thefourth quarter of 2021 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false orspam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so ourestimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts couldbe higher than we have estimated. We are continually seeking to improve our ability to estimate the total number of spam accounts and eliminate them from thecalculation of our mDAU, and have made improvements in our spam detection capabilities that have resulted in the suspension of a large number of spam,malicious automation, and fake accounts. We intend to continue to make such improvements. After we determine an account is spam, malicious automation, orfake, we stop counting it in our mDAU, or other related metrics

The claim that the real numbers are 1/10 to 1/100 is ... absurd. "Tech company say something, therefore BAD." tier. A lot of people use twitter!

A lot of people - sure. Every fourth adult American? Not even close. Not because of tech company (though I would totally expect any underhanded behavior that they are sure they can legally get away with from Twitter) but because it wildly mismatches my experience, and people in my bubble most are all technologically savvy college-educated and not technophobes at all. Still I wouldn't save every fourth uses Twitter. Now add to that all people with less technology inclination and cultural fit for twitter use - and these numbers get a bit ridiculous. Yes, 1/100 is probably an exaggeration. But so is 70 million.

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Since when was Twitter a wellspring of culture at all, let alone the main one? Twitter is 90% people saying stupid shit and getting into Internet drama.

That's not at all incompatible though. The other 10% could be influential, and that's what you'd expect - 90% of everything is shit, elite theory, whatever

Internet drama that we all subsequently talk about and/or elect president.

I think that a lot of the people who live and breathe internet drama forget just how niche it is.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this.

No it really is not. Twitter is, if anything, patient zero.

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