
Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet - antonius
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/11/new-data-quantifies-dearth-of-tweeters-on-twitter/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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simonsarris
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
Do you add relevant hashtags to your jokes/deep thoughts? That would help them
to be discovered by others.

~~~
simonsarris
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.

~~~
thix0tr0pic
A common method to avoid interfering with the statement you're trying to make
is to mash as many hashtags in as possible after the fact.

~~~
arjie
Can you imagine that, though?

"The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease #joke #black
humour #funny #comedy"

You'd look like a colossal ass if you did that.

~~~
brc
That is how twitter jokes look. It is part and parcel of the medium. Better to
have the joke look like a twitter joke and get read by an audience, than to
make it pure and read by nobody. Really, the hashtags are no more out of place
than a smiley face on an email.

~~~
berberous
I don't use Twitter, but based on what I see on Instagram, I agree with the
parent that those people look like asses. It comes off as whoring for
followers, and a bit desperate.

I think it's different, however, if there are a few hashtags at the end which
in themselves are jokes or metajokes and that add to the cleverness of the
post, in the same way that XKCD alt-text does. A string of simple categories
(#joke #jokes #funny #comedy) is just annoying.

------
jere
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.

~~~
tombrossman
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.

~~~
jere
Hmmm, interesting. I just never considered that my responsibility. I'll think
about doing that.

One problem with blocking bots is sometimes I really can't tell if they are
bots. Bots often copy profile pictures, descriptions, and tweets from real
users. Some real users tweet pretty cryptic stuff. And blocking feels like
such a serious step; I wouldn't watch to risk false positives.

~~~
tombrossman
You are probably better at detecting bots than you think. The same way you can
recognise phishing and spam due to spelling or syntax errors. If I get a new
follower and the only contact they've made with me is via Twitter, and their
tweets are totally odd or cryptic, they aren't adding to my experience so away
they go.

I've only had one false positive I know of and it was one of my wife's
friends. She had a profile picture of her teenage daughters and no tweet
history. I thought 'what the hell is a teenage girl doing following me -
guaranteed spammer' only to find out who it was the next day. I unblocked and
no offense was taken and no harm done.

Still, I guess I'm a bit stricter than average and this is something that most
people don't care about.

------
joosters
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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I'm even worse. I created a Twitter account a few years ago and immediately
asked myself "why am I doing this?"

Logged out without sending a single tweet and never went back. I still get a
few emails from them every month wondering what happened to me. Still can't
figure out why I would need an account.

~~~
Nickoladze
I used mine once to enter into to some contest. It's useful for doing that.

~~~
talmand
It's the new toss your business card into the bowl thing.

------
freyr
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
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).

------
ryandrake
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.

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will_brown
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.

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dm2
I have never send a tweet and just use it as a news feed. Is there anything
wrong with that?

~~~
x5315
Nope.

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mathattack
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.

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josefresco
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.

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spilk
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.

------
pinaceae
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
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

~~~
pinaceae
then follow sites. lots of them now have twitter feeds.

see @daringfireball vs. @gruber.

or the various @HN feeds.

~~~
Touche
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
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.

~~~
Touche
They do disappear off of your feed in which case you'll never see them again.
There is no concept of "unread" tweets, like there is with RSS.

~~~
nnkh
You can scroll down. The latter is true.

~~~
Touche
> You can scroll down.

Not if you check it once a day (or even once an _hour_ depending on how many
things you follow), it's gone by then.

------
KrisAndrew
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.

------
swalsh
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.

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Touche
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.

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sharkweek
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
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.

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cruise02
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%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29)

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Pxtl
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.

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digikata
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...).

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luos
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.

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simoneau
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.

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eksith
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...

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qwerta
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.

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bunderbunder
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
Having conversations with people and not just sending out a single tweet has
helped me a little bit.

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nilkn
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.

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brc
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.

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danmaz74
Using twitter just to consume information is perfectly legit

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

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

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synfin80
I'd be interested in how many of the ones that have sent tweets were from
hijacked accounts.

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cookerware
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.

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Pxtl
The other 56% are spammers.

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

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nextstep
And those accounts have all the good usernames :(

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huangc10
I believe this.

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

~~~
robin_reala
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.

~~~
uptown
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
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.

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swasheck
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?

