This anecdote is the answer to the lack of data that would support the user count decline of Twitter? I'm sorry to damage your ego but you're just a single data point and extrapolating how you see things to a non-quantifiable amount of other users isn't a reasonable argument.
> There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet, and 185 million daily active twitter users.
Twitter is a US platform first and foremost. It doesn't make sense to compare the total number of Twitter users against the number of people on the entire planet. According to Statista:
> Social network Twitter is particularly popular in the United States, where as of January 2021, the microblogging service had audience reach of 69.3 million users
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 quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users"
It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network.
> Twitter is experiencing something of a resurgence these days, with user numbers growing since Trump.
Any references for this? Growth looks pretty moribund[1], especially since bot-users may represent most growth and could even be masking dropping human-user MAUs.
That was a study of ~3000 people. They also excluded products, institutions and international (obviously) users. Not really representative of Twitter considering a decent part of its interactions are businesses and institutions engaging with the public...
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.
> 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month.
75% of actual users or 75% of user accounts? I'm guessing the latter since the former is impossible to count. I'm almost surprised it's not higher — I think I have 5 twitter accounts and I definitely haven't posted from 4 of those for way over a month.
"None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients"
"Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users"
Also, note the commenters saying that the count is higher/lower than expected. Plus some not sure what to expect. I'm not hating on Twitter or the OP, just find the data rather meaningless.
it’s a nonsense argument, most people (including musk) couldn’t even articulate robust criteria for measuring a “non-human” user — musk himself has undermined his position on this topic multiple times.
Twitter has never claimed that the number is accurate nor important in absolute terms (“we aren’t sure” features prominently in their filings!) rather it’s a number that is important for understanding growth and evolution of the platform. The number matters quarter-to-quarter, not in isolation.
Active human users matters in the context of advertising, it’s a pointless distraction that musk is employing to back out of the deal.
Let’s imagine there is a real measure of “non-human users” and lets say it turns out that Twitter underestimated by 50%… so? Musk long said he wasn’t buying Twitter as a financial move, and that he has a plan to be wildly profitable off of a small proportion of twitter’s users so unless 95% of twitter’s users aren’t real, it doesn’t impact his (absurd and ridiculous) plan.
so 9 times as many. Also, most users of Twitter probably don't even notice the latest Musk controversies, since those things aren't the tweets they follow. So, it seems to me like the author is mostly looking just past her own nose.
Imagine this. I spread out my arms wide apart. My left palm represents reality. My right palm represents the dimension where the author of this article currently exists, but to get from left to right palm, you have to go one time around the globe.
This article is so far from reality, it's stupid. The data point is a single anectdotal one. There is no info on the data. There is no hint at all that twitter had anything to do with the decline - it could just as well have been birds pecking at the internet cables to all the subscribers houses and disrupting exactly those packets.
Totally biased in-the-bubble speculation, this blog post is not even wrong, it's just silly.
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