Slashdot Mirror
Of 1.2 Billion Twitter Posts, 71% Are Ignored
destinyland writes "1.2 billion Twitter 'tweets' were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsoever — no online responses, and no Twitter 'retweets.' 'Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way,' the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply." I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.
I guess all the "i showered" "I dressed" "I got in the car" "I drove to work/school" ect... tales of peoples' day just arent *that* exciting
I don't really see why this is a particularly surprising statistic. So most Tweets are only read by users... Most Slashdot stories I don't reply to and only read, does that mean that Slashdot is somehow limited or has a large number of dead stories? Of course not, it's just that most people do lots more reading than writing.
Why are we assuming that tweets are intended to net a response?
I originally had the impression that it was supposed to be a social site, but I got very little interaction on it despite having many followers from other social sites who interacted regularly with me on those other sites.
In my case, 100% are ignored.
You mean to tell me that the majority of people actually do not care about things like "just went to the bathroom" or "I am on a date right now?" Next you'll be telling me that most blogs receive less than 5 unique visitors per year or that the personal webpage I made when I was 13 was ignored!
Is this really news? I guess the precise number counts as news; I would have placed it somewhere closer to 99%.
Palm trees and 8
Just because nobody replies to the tweet doesn't mean people aren't reading it.
You might as well say that X% of newspaper articles are 'ignored' because they don't generate letters to the Editor about them.
I am NOT expressing any opinion on the subjective usefulness of the average tweet, however.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
The problem is that it's very difficult to fit what you want to say into 140 characters. Unless you're into text speak, you may find that y
Summation 2
I don't use Twitter as any kind of social network, but when I tweet that "The school is closed to due to snow" I know that it isn't ignored, even if no replies are received. In fact, I do sometimes get replied - via e-mail.
You should see how many postings on Slashdot get ignored.
There is not enough hours in the day to read everything you might like.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
If you are using Twitter to have conversations you are doing it wrong. Back in the dinosaur age if something happened to you(passed a test got herpes whatever) you would actually have to phone/write several people saying the exact same thing. You weren't always looking for a response but just wanted to share the news. Thats what twitter is for. It's not really meant for deep conversations.
Monstar L
29% of tweets aren't ignored. That is an incredibly good hit rate, for what is essentially a write-only, vanity medium. Imagine if that same level of response could be replicated in real life: nearly one-third of the mutterings and grumbles that we hear all the time elicited a response (apart from "Oh, do shut up!") we'd spend all day engaged in pointless and empty conversations with complete strangers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That's a lot more effective than I thought.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Twitter isn't designed for discussions, it's designed for announcements. If a weatherman makes an announcement that a tornado is forming north of a city, you wouldn't expect everyone - or anyone for that matter - to call him up and have a discussion about it.
My personal contribution is the small but powerful end of the bellcurve...
somewhere there are accounts getting tons of retweets... I help keep that statistic low.
I'd be more than a tad disturbed if I found one of my friends re-tweeting: "Dude, I just took the largest dump in history!"
Since when has twitter ever been primarily about being relevant? It's always been about being real-ish, and for most people, reality is not retweet or reply worthy.
1
(Which is what you inevitably end up with after applying perfect compression that removes at least one bit with each pass).
It can furthermore be stated that for Tweets this achieves near lossless compression.
While the headline says that 71% are "ignored", TFA does at least say that they get "no reaction" (i.e. no reply or retweet). TBH, that's probably reasonable from my experience - I follow several announcement feeds but don't retweet them most of the time because they're specific to my interests and anyone else who is also interested can follow it themselves.
What I do wonder, though, is what proportion of those multi-level responses (replies to replies) and replies in general are from the unwashed masses with their inane drivel replying to the inane drivel of their friends. If only computers could classify "interesting technical pointers, snippets and announcements" versus "inane drivel about bodily functions or other personal activity" so that we could see the difference in the two and whether there are more replies to the important stuff or to the drivel that any sensible person ignores.
and how many times does the response go off channel??
ie farm1785: SVR Gandalf ON FIRE
farm1785: HLN ACTIVE PWR Discon rack 45
[45 tweets from service monitors]
none of these would be responded to by Twitter
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Pareto strikes again!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What percentage of slashdot news posts are ignored? Comments? Sounds like the infamous 71/29 rule.
Actually, a perfect compression algorithm would have the entropy of its input as the lower bound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Palm trees and 8
100% Are Ignored.
Reminds me of the joke, if a tree falls...
If a tweet is tweeted but never read, does Jack Daniels fall down in the forest?
This is just a matter of time and you will all realize that buzzwords are still buzzwords. No matter is it 2000 or 2010, some things are just plain stupid and will disappear.
If only computers could classify "interesting technical pointers, snippets and announcements" versus "inane drivel about bodily functions or other personal activity"
if you're prepared to accept a 99% level of confidence, the answer is yes, computers can classify inane crap. The simple way to do this is to realise that something over 99% of all internet traffic is inane crap. Therefore saying "all of it" satisfies the 99% requirement (and probably includes this post, too).
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You take it too seriously... I'm talking about the "perfect compression" that is up there with the "perpetuum mobile"... Every once in a while there is someone that absolutely believes they've found it (like this hit from Google) even though it's proven to be impossible.
I have to wonder what the percentage would be for Facebook. 71% may seem high (or low) but I wonder how it would stand compared against other similar services like Facebook or myspace
Well, good! If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I'm proud to report I am still Twitter free. It's the most popular yet absolutely useless website ever. Post here if you are Twitter free and intend to remain that way. This thread is for you!
Considering that the original (and to some extent current) "purpose" of Twitter is for posting where you are and what you are doing at the moment (see the slogan, "What are you doing right now?"), most tweets are probably not intended to be replied to anyway. And in the real world, that is also my experience.
Actually, a perfect compression algorithm would have the entropy of its input as the lower bound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Well, we've started to go down this road, so why not go all the way? Measuring the entropy of its input depends on the probabilistic model used. For instance, a compression algorithm dedicated to only describing the text of the Bible could do so with 1 bit. Either it's the Bible or nothing. Commonly used models for entropy calculations put the English language at 1.5 bits per character, so we've seemingly broken the above lower bound.
What you really should measure it in is Kolmogorov complexity, which is roughly speaking the length of the shortest algorithm that generates the input (in some predetermined language, bla bla).
My UID is prime. Hah!
I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.
(Well, hey, parent got +1 Interesting for repeating what was in the summary, so it’s worth a shot.)
It is my belief that this development speaks to the niche that twitter can best fit rather than any flaw in the underlying tool itself. For example, if I have a Nook or Ipad as my book reader, I can do a lot of different things with it and probably will buy fewer paper books to read since I can just read e-books. However, if I want to take something with me to the beach to read (because I usually run there or bike) I will probably take a paperback with me to read rather than my e-reader because the paperback is more durable and if it gets damaged I don't have a problem. Twitter is a very valuable tool if you are a celebrity or a public figure and you have a large number of people interested in what you are doing. It is totally pointless for someone like me who has a blog that averages about 200 hits a month and can easily send an e-mail or phone call to the three or so people who might be interested in what is up with me. I'm a hermit and proud of it. With the current web, we're in the process of fitting tools to the most effective use because doing so makes money. It is characteristic of most late stage technological societies. The next question is what will the next technological leap be? Or will we finally reach an economic singularity?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
I'd just like to point out that the word 'ignored' does not appear anywhere in TFA. By saying that 71% are ignored, whoever it was that wrote the headline for this submission has drawn their own, very clearly non-provable, conclusion from the data contained in TFA.
Slashdot.
Bet this one rolls in the replies, huh?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
This doesn't surprise me (and I seem to be in the minority here who actually finds Twitter useful). I wonder how many Slashdot comments get replied to. Think about it. Suppose you have 10 comments to an article and 5 of those get 1 reply each. You now have 15 comments with only 5 being replied to, or 66% being "ignored". Add a few more second level comments, some third level comments, some "moderated to -1" comments, some jokes which elicit a "+5 Funny" but no replies, etc and you could easily have over 70% of Slashdot comments being "ignored" (where ignored is defined as not have any replies).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I can't imagine it's any different on any other social networking site. Even Slashdot has a large percentage of unresponded-to posts.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
A good number of tweets just post links to other sites (e.g. "Check out this baby panda LOL http:\\bit.ly\whateveh\".) Tweets from companies or blogs do almost nothing but that. It'd be interesting to know what type of clickthrough rate these links get, which the analysis doesn't appear to address.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
What percentage of blog posts get a reply? My guess is a lot less than 29%. 29% is shockingly high.
...is considered ignored? This is a flawed study with a sweeping conclusion based on a bad assumption.
I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.
lol
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/10/03/0251221
Or am i just old fashion ;)
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
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I decompressed your message, but it appears to be perfectly encrypted as well.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's exactly 29% less of Twitter's posts that I ignore.
/* No Comment */
What if I click on a link? What if I pass that link on to my facebook friends? What If I comment on the forum that link points to and that comment gets re-tweeted. I doubt any of these actions have made the stats. So, the stats might be interesting, but I venture that the name of the stat is mislabled. It should be titled: "Number of tweets that are replied to or retweeted". Nothing more.
Of course, failbook is an even bigger mess Buy 5,000 facebook fans for $30, 150,000 fans for $160 (ten for a penny). And that's about what the average facebook account really is worth, if you believe that the market sets the price.
Rather than looking at the number of replies & retweets, a much better methodology is to look at the number of clicks that a link posted inside a tweet gets.
When I post a link (using my YOURLS powered shortener) Approximately 5% of my 600 followers will click the link. Retweets and responses are much more rare than clicks. If anybody clicks the link, the tweet was not ignored, but according to this study they were.
Regularly I'll tweet something, then a day or two later, I'll have somebody ask me IRL about something mentioned tweet. So despite a lack of twitter responses and retweets, clearly the tweet was read by a "lurker". But according to the standard of this study they were ignored.
Finally, I have my tweets set to funnel into Facebook, which despite having 1/3 of the followers there, it's far more likely that a tweet will receive a response or a "Like". This study doesn't consider that either.
Shameless trawling for more followers: Follow Me on Twitter
To blog is sublime
I have come to an age and I will tell you something... What? Already bored?
OK, a one liner then. I hate wasting my time on quick, shallow communication.
Why would I contemplate chit chat? I'm a geek and I like knowing exactly how people and stuff work. I won't invest time in witnessing symptoms or occasional exclamations.
I'm surprised 29% of the messages are actually read. Must be the indexing bots. And even those contraptions don't really care.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you follow any significant amount of people, it's easy for your timeline to get overwhelmed so you don't even see the slightly older tweets.
I often end up just heading to the pages for particular feeds
Also, even if you reply to someone, they might not reply to you. Thus your reply tweet isn't itself responded to. This is to be expected if the target is famous (i.e they're deluged with replies), but @JohnDoe often doesn't reply either. :P
And conversations on Twitter as in elsewhere peter out.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
ACK2
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Its usually a good indication that they are ignored or virtually ignored. Perhaps they are read but they would be discarded as quickly as they are read, without any further discussion, comment or "nod of the head" as W B Yeats would say..
Uhmmmm, not necessarily. For example, I follow certain lead developers, tech entrepreneurs, scientists and ex-coworkers on Twitter. Typically they post some very interesting tweets that I simply bookmark or forward to friends and present/former colleagues. I rarely re-tweet. Sometimes I reply back with a tweet, but never engage in a twitter tech-related conversation.
Maybe my experience with Twitter might not be the norm, but I highly doubt that it is that rare either. Despite of what some people like to think, there are brilliant people on twitter producing information, much of which ends up being consumed outside of the twitter system of things. And that's what makes it very hard to gauge a tweet's lack of relevance. The lack of tracking such consumption constitutes a lack of evidence of something being ignored.
Trying to prove, infer or claim with some accuracy that something in Twitter is being ignored because there is no visible proof that it is not is akin to proving a negative. In other words, don't do it, for it is not logical.
Granted, there's the introductory video from Twitter that suggests you use Twitter in just that way.
However, almost everyone I know who uses Twitter uses it primarily to post links to articles or interesting Websites, along with a short comment on the content -- hence the wide use of URL shorteners.
It's well known that for message boards, blogs, email lists, etc., most readers are "lurkers," who read without posting responses. I expect the metrics vary, but I remember someone's general rule was one hundred lurkers for every active participant in a discussion.
So, I read these stats as meaning that there's an astonishingly high level of response on Twitter -- although that's offset from the comments that there are people gaming Twitter to generate "hype."
Please don't ban me or kill my karma. I just read the article. I could not find the line about most twits not being able to engage in meaningful whatever. That was the thing in the summary I disagreed with. They should only conclude that if measuring of response rate is a good proxy for meaningful use. The overall tone of the article made it seem they were evaluating the effectiveness of a messaging system, whereas twitter, as i understand it, is an announcement system. I don't tweet because I don't have a sense a humor that would allow me to be called a twit. I do facebook, and my status doesn't always get a response on FB. But, I'll bump into someone in real life or receive an email, and it's clear they've been reading my status.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest