
How Twitter Users Compare to the General Public - prostoalex
https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/#nws=mcnewsletter
======
msvan
> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from
> adult U.S. users.

One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from
bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people
would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and
nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of
information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is
popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way
communication channel.

If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly,
but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the
void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days,
many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in
chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.

~~~
iheartpotatoes
Twitter is the literal opposite of community-building, like usenet used to be.

Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users
we see online today.

I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY
compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any
means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods,
reddit would be even worse than it is right now.

~~~
snarf21
I would disagree. It is community building in a different construct. There is
no /r/X or group structure built in. I am only Twitter because I design board
games. I only interact with board game community accounts and posts. The
community is diverse, varied and thriving. If I was trying to get 100K
followers to argue about politics maybe I'd have a bad time. I'm just trying
to say that there is a lot of community building but it is self-directed not
controlled by the platform.

~~~
iheartpotatoes
>> It is community building in a different construct

Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it?
Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone
Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by
their legions of followers.

~~~
snarf21
Yes and no. There are several medium sized publishers that run their own
accounts and are active participants in the conversations. It is a slightly
different structure because you can meet and talk with them at conventions too
but in the end it is a marketing tool to build their audience. Some of the
most famous game designers in the world actively communicate with other
members all the time. There are also sub-communities of just people who design
games or people who follow popular game reviewers, etc. I was just trying to
make the point that there are _some_ communities on Twitter but they are self
organizing. There are sites like boardgamegeek that are popular too but some
of the reddit communities have weird rules like not being able to post that
you have a new game coming out.

------
SolaceQuantum
_"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes,
behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the
platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65%
are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. And these most active
tweeters are much more likely than others to say they post about political
issues. Fully 69% of the top 10% most prolific tweeters say they have tweeted
about politics, compared with 39% of Twitter users generally. And 42% say they
have tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with just 13% of
other users.

The Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the
top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that
allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters
have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...."_

I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their
behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to
be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.

~~~
taborj
And especially alarming when combined with this:

 _" In fact, this analysis estimates that the top 10% of tweeters are
responsible for 80% of the tweets created by all U.S. adults on Twitter."_

~~~
overcast
Is this unexpected? Just like anywhere. 10% of the people are doing 90% of the
work.

~~~
rootusrootus
Heck, don't we even have a name for it because it happens all the time? Pareto
distribution.

------
_Marak_
I'd like to see a study which compares the average sentiment of a user's
Tweets to the amount of Tweets that user has published in their lifetime.

From my casual observations I've seen a direct correlation between amount of
lifetime Tweets a user has and the likelihood of them consistently Tweeting
angry or hateful messages.

~~~
matt4077
I’m not sure if # of tweets, which isn’t even equivalent to account age, is
the appropriate figure here. Followers would be far more meaningful.

I don’t check # of tweets and therefore can’t judge your observation. But
lookin at some top tweets and users, their content seems to invariably be more
nuanced and civil than replies to them, which are mostly from frothing-at-the-
mouth dickheads with no followers.

------
smacktoward
_> Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors
and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less
often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared
with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters._

I find this fascinating. If the data are correct, Twitter's most valuable
users (the ones who write all the Tweets) are overwhelmingly (65%) women, and
even among the less active "lurkers" women make up just a little less than
half. And yet, ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her
experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of
threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness -- all of which Twitter has shown
next to zero interest in curbing.

It requires some seriously blinkered management to decide it's not important
for your service to provide at least a minimally welcoming experience for its
core audience.

~~~
haberman
I don't think Twitter provides a welcoming experience for anybody. "Threats,
abuse, and general unpleasantness" could be the site's slogan.

------
wafflesraccoon
Twitter is hands down my favorite social media platform, I really enjoy how I
can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests.
It is also a great way to share my own content and interact with the people
that are interested in it. There is also the unspoken benefit that unfollowing
someone does not have the same social impact as unfriending someone on
Facebook.

(Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)

~~~
haberman
You can unfollow people on Facebook without unfriending them. Works wonders
for people who you have a relationship with, but don't necessarily need to see
their stream of posts.

~~~
wafflesraccoon
I have not touched Facebook in years, I'm glad they have added that feature. I
might have to check it out again, thanks.

~~~
dvtrn
There's also a new 'snooze' feature, where you can 'snooze' a person for 30
days.

Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels
an awful lot like.... _work_ does. Everything compartmentalized, specific
functions to deal with people down stream..

------
aoner
Slightly off-topic: am I the only one noticing massive amounts of fake
accounts that are into climate denying?

------
aantix
I've seen the trend with some news outlets to report "what people are saying"
and by that, reference a bunch of tweets about the topic. Which is lazy
reporting.

But confirmed by this report, Twitter isn't the general public. Twitter is
incredibly progressive and hotly political.

If Twitter would have been the one voting, Hillary would have been voted into
office. But they weren't, and there was a whole segment of the country
ignored, that probably isn't on Twitter. And it's no wonder that half the tech
sphere was "stunned" was Trump was able to wiggle his way into office.

------
writepub
This is excellent data!

1\. It has long been argued that Twitter has a liberal bias. This data proves
it, with 60% of the users leaning left.

2\. While the cause of #1 hasn't been established, it is likely that
moderators and policy makers in Twitter live in left leaning cities in the US,
with admittedly left leaning political views. These folks tend to favor one
side in the their censorship.

3\. If one considers the fact that 80% of the content is generated by 10%, and
the politics of that 10% further skews left, one can see why Twitter looks
like a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.

~~~
0815test
> a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.

Meh, it's all relative. I'm not exactly on the left and while the left echo
chamber may seem uninviting, the right-wing echo chamber ( _cough cough gab
cough cough_ ) somehow manages to be a lot worse.

~~~
weberc2
Agreed, although the right-wing echo chamber is rightly marginalized (in the
literal sense of the word), while the far-left are running newsrooms,
universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. I don't think
the far-left should be pushed quite as far to the margins as the far-right,
but not putting them so squarely in positions of massive influence would be a
good start.

~~~
rootusrootus
I've completely lost track of politics at this point. When I think "far left"
I think of things like communism, socialism, etc. Something that basically
doesn't exist in American politics. Sure, we have a segment of the
commentariat accusing the left of being socialist, but I don't see anyone on
the left advocating for actual socialism, just "social democracy" a la western
Europe.

I would love to know what supposedly counts as far left now. We've shifted the
overton window so far that I'm really lost.

~~~
weberc2
Yeah, I'm not sure that "far left" is the appropriate term, but I wanted to
communicate "people to the left of moderate liberals". I'm thinking people
whose "egalitarian" vision demands segregation and treatment according to a
strict hierarchy of immutable characteristics. People who use terms like
"nazi" and "white supremacist" to refer to liberals and anyone right thereof.
Not sure what the proper term is for this group.

~~~
rootusrootus
Yeah no idea. Personally I prefer to reserve nazi and white supremacist labels
for those who actually are. And beyond that I try to avoid labels. Getting
fairly tired of the whole thing, really. My friends who tend towards more
typical conservative views view me as very liberal. My liberal friends view me
as conservative. Ha! Turns out I'm both, depending on what issue we're talking
about.

We paint with very broad brushes these days, mostly to win arguments I think.
Hard to say who is really at fault at this point, but I think in America our
politics are just going to get nastier until some other country grows a sack
big enough to attack us again.

