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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Consensus is monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/

Remains to be seen how many are real humans though.

It frustrates me to think I count in this number even though I only have a fake Facebook account under a fake name and with no friends, simply because my job requires that I log into their developer account occasionally.

You and other fake test accounts by developers are still a rounding error. More interesting statistics is how many fake accounts are created for influencing discussion. Twitter has a huge problem with this, Facebook seems to handle it better but even if it is a single digits (1-5%) it is still tens of millions of accounts

I legitimately wonder how many of these accounts are "real" (e.g. not bots, not developer accounts, not "old" accounts, not parody accounts, etc). I know I have 3 accounts myself (various developer accounts), but even nontechnical friends "remake" their FB every year or so pretty regularly (my sister has a good 5-6 accounts that she no longer uses anymore). And that's completely ignoring however many spam/bots there are out there spamming FB messenger, groups, friend requests, etc.

That is mind-blowing. 2 billion total users an immense volume in and of itself but 2 billion even semi active users is incredible

Google's profile counts -- Android, Gmail, Youtube, and G+, mostly, in about that order, topped 3 billion a while ago.

http://archive.is/zi4Uw

(Origin site appears down.)

I have at least two Google accounts and a very old never-really-used Youtube account (from the days before it was a Google account), so it's very appropriate that you say "profile count" rather than "user count".

I'm quite aware of that, but yes, that's a crucial distinction.

Point being that very large user account collections do exist.

Only active users should be counted.

An upstream comment menttioned total accounts.

I've some awareness of G+ active users.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

There may also be other concerns or interests.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

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