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44% of Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted
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."
Most will have signed up, thought it crap, and never returned. Most people don't delete dead accounts and counting them as "users" is as false as counting someone as driving a Toyota if they once took a test drive.
Most of these accounts are fake. Just made to boost the popularity of celebrities/politicians so they look like they are more popular.
I wish the other 56% didn't either.
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.
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.
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 where none could possibly exist. Shoddy, shoddy journalism.
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
In other news: 44% of Slashdot readers have never posted a single comment.
No sig today...
We could look at how many accounts are used actively (token pulls, OAuth, logins) and not just one aspect of using twitter to get a much better idea of how Twitter is used. Simply stating that accounts don't use a certain feature is... misleading at best.
What's next, "Most people on blogger don't write blogs?" Certainly some people are just readers. (Not to mention the plethora of remade accounts, duplicates, bots, placeholders, etc...)
Doesn't mean people don't THINK others don't want to know what they ate for breakfast... You'd be surprised at the garbage I've seen posted on both FB and Twitter.
This is okay. Twitter is labelled as a "microblogging" platform, but many people use it as a multicast IM, or just a newsfeed app. Not to mention the bots.
Further proof that Google+ is dead in the OH WAIT, THAT SAID TWITTER? /s
I have a newspaper subscription but I never post in it. Most people are passive in when they use a service.
Most people that are in a IRC chatroom are quiet but they are there out of habit and nothing else.
How is this a news article?
Having an "account" does not mean anything. Every letter I use here can be its own account on slashdot. Does slashdot got alot of new "users"?
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.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"This could be a sign of many users just signing up and forgetting about their account, or they just prefer reading other's posts."
Having the self-knowledge to know that -as most people- don't have something so interesting to communicate in the -so public- Twitter way (we still have email for the rest).
I am Greek - everything that needs to be said has already been said by my great ancestors! (o.k., o.k., i am leaving now...)
...to the fact that about 85% of world population does not use Twitter!
And luckily 99% of Slashdot-users have not Slashdotted either...
Twitter is much faster and more reliable than text messages, and the ISP's don't bundle up the Tweets and make you wait an hour before they arrive like they've done repeatedly for SMS. That cost me a *job* because the IT guys refused to let me clear the constant 300 messages a day of Nagios alerts and kept saying "just pay attention to the important ones", which they could not define. So when I was on call, I'd have to pore through bursts of a hundred messages to try and figure out if any mattered, and by that time my boss (who would *never get off his damn email*) had already read the alerts and jumped in. Coupled with the "every message from the same phone->text system had a new contact number with it", and it was ridiculous.
Twitter was *very* helpful for dealing with this.
I would think the vast majority of people just used Twitter to read other people's shit. Although maybe a lot of people make one or two posts before finding the whole thing utterly tiresome and never logging in again, which would be the category I'm in.
99.9999% have never posted anything of any value.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Like on this particular article. If you click on this article from slashdot classic, you are always redirected to Beta. We don't want beta Dice! Listen to your users! Forcing it on people is only going to cause a mass exodus from slashdot!
I signed up and never posted simply to use twitter credentials on other web sites.
Never posted a single message.
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.
Anyone remember the good old days before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter? When you had to take a photo of your dinner, then get the film developed, then go around to all your friends' houses to show them the picture of your dinner?
No?
Me neither.
Additionally, it's been in public testing for over a half year already. Kind of sad how Dice has kept us long time in a continuous stress of the gloomy shadow of Beta over us. I wonder how long this continues.
Will everyone commenting to this please do so in at most 140 characters. Thank you.
And I wish more of the remaining 56% would follow suit...
The number of dormant accounts isn't terribly surprising to anyone that's run a site with users (although its likely much higher than Twitter would like broadly known). The bigger concern is really how the high number of fake / zombie accounts on Twitter impact's it's business model. Advertisers pay for clicks/follows and in talking to advertisers I hear a frustration with the not insignificant amount of paid 'traffic' coming from bots/fake accounts that simply troll the site clicking links and 'following' people. Twitter needs to get much better at separating the 'real' users from the noise... and there's a LOT of noise. To an advertiser that's like finding out a bunch of those magazines you advertised in based on X number of subscribers were just shipped straight to the landfill...
"Twopcharts (a third party website that records and monitors activity on Twitter)
So do they work for the NSA, or are they just a wanabe?
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.
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
signature pending slashdot approval
Shockingly, I have gotten better support from Samsung's twitter support account than their phone and email support.
Like any other tool or application, if you don't find it useful don't use it.
Which is worse? The ones who never post, or the ones who post once and never return?
And I'm 1 of those 1,000,000's. I got an account for gits and shingles and never went back. I don't even read that malarkey.
They're probably fake twitter followers. Not suprising really.
where people earn cool points for how long they've been idle.