There's probably a distorted view there where the percentage of overall users using third-party clients is absolutely minuscule, but if you look at the percentage of content _creators_ it's much larger. At least I remember reading it was like that around the time that I stopped using Twitter a few years ago.
How many people use third-party Reddit clients versus using third-party Twitter clients as a percentage of total users on each site? (I don't know—not a rhetorical)
As pointed out in the update to the article, this isn't counting those who switch to using Twitter clients, which as the comment points out, accounts for about 70% of total tweets.
According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.
As soon as I saw that, I immediately thought "I'd like to see the breakdown by tweet source," since that's really just a hollow number that means that 90% of active Twitter users sign into Twitter.com at least once a month. Much, much more of the actual content creation and consumption still happens on third party apps.
And to continue the recent pie chart hate on HN, I really wish this was just a series of bar graphs or something that gave me exact numbers instead of having to guesstimate that web makes up 1/3rd of tweets.
Something else to note, though, is that a large number of twitter users use twitter clients. This means that the traffic looks direct when it is, in fact, from twitter.
Those same stats are true for EVERY social media platform. Twitter is not the exception here. What percentage of Reddit users do you think comment on a post? What percentage of hacker news readers submit new posts or write comments? Instagram content consumers vs producers?
Most people are followers and that’s ok. You can get off your soap box now.
I worked for Twitter up until 2017 and when I was there it was much higher than 20-30%, definitely >50%. It's very possibly changed since then, but at least at that point in time Twitter was running Mesos on many thousands of machines.
Great example- the latest figures I can find state that only 13% of the US population use Twitter. I have to imagine the figure is even lower internationally, and only a tiny minority of that 13% post to it regularly.
It's pretty hard to draw any conclusions at all from this.
The number is very low compared with other communication mediums - IRC, IM, SMS, Email, facebook. Clearly they've grown well, but they have a long way to go yet.
The other point is that a large(ish) proportion of twitter seems to be bots and automated tweeting. It's hard to guess how much though.
>> "These numbers are definitely noteworthy and provide evidence against the perception that Twitter is not growing"
It doesn't provide any insight into what is growing though. Are people genuinely using twitter more, or are bots using it more, spammers, PR etc
It is. The statistic the article is actually referencing is that ~25%, "use twitter"[0]. That most likely indicates they at least open Twitter. Another post from the same site, the article references, has the headline that about 10% of those create 80% of the content[1]. Bottom-line a fraction of 25% sometimes tweet.
It looks like twitter has about twice the global users as in 2013, but there are like twice the internet users globally than in 2013 and ~5 countries make up half their users.. So it seems pretty accurate to me that they are further from global relevance than in 2013.
Here's an even less popular take: as someone just casually browsing twitter, it seems to work pretty much the same or slightly better than it used to, with the same (or slightly better) content. The fact that they achieve this with one quarter (!) or so [*] of their previous headcount is truly amazing, and more interesting than some of the other takes media tries to spin on it.
[* by some accounts one tenth -- this is even more amazing if true]
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