How Twitter Users Compare to the General Public
pewinternet.org
pewinternet.org
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.
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.
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.
It's not just dumb tweeting into the void, Twitter basically makes you dumb in order to avoid tweeting into the void.
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.
" 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."
Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.
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.
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.
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.
The default on the internet is male, and the same goes for anons, because we expect women to make themselves noticable. When they don't, we assume they are men. But clearly social media is mainly for and by women. Maybe they ought to own up to that.
I have never seen more drama and abuse as in female dominated groups. Men have an argument, fight, and then go have a beer. Women will waffle and try to appear the reasonable party, but only so they can stick the knife in the back later, and they rarely forgive. This is generally true, but any woman who does not fight this way is a treasure who you can invite into groups of men without changing the dynamic permanently.
Yes, actually I really do think so. Never mind ED or Kiwifarms, what about B1FF and the Meow Wars? Internet trolling and flame-baiting very much dates back to the 1980s, when the Internet was truly a male domain; Twitter and Tumblr have simply made it mainstream. At most, we could say that some women with remarkably antisocial tendencies may have joined the fray with gusto, but I just don't buy the claim that they even account for anything close to a majority of that, erm, userbase.
I do know several women who are moderately active on twitter and have not had experiences like this. Most of the people I know on twitter are in the accessibility community, K12 education, or higher education. Perhaps these spaces do not have the same behaviors that you describe? It’s possible that these areas are overwhelmingly female and that the gender balance changes the dynamic.
(Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)
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..
How much work did that take you?
I've tried to do what you describe.... but time and again I grow tired scrolling through hordes of "I really followed this person or thing to hear about this content but now they're tweeting about X" and found I constantly had to manage it. It was to the point that I just would rather keep bookmarks as websites are better at staying focused than most twitter accounts.
In a way, the management of my feed is a never ending game. Typically the problem I see is that people are too reluctant to unfollow/ follow other accounts.
Not a twitter user currently. Tried it a few years ago and that was the problem I had.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps, but elite opinions in those sorts of highly-developed, urban institutions have been dominated by the "left" side of the political spectrum since we've had a recognizable left-right (or 'progressive-conservative') split. Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims left, there's nothing new under the sun. Of course many people think that today's left is too radical for its own good, but I wouldn't know how to even start to counter that tendency - and, again, you could say similar things about radicalism on the right - I remember what the Tea Party grassroots movement was like in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like the total craziness we see today!
It's a little pricy (it's a textbook) for a used copy on Amazon at the moment, but I watched the listings for a while and managed to pick up two copies for less than $31 a piece this winter. Not perfect, but it's pretty accessible and systematic.
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.
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.
Many normal, peace loving, non bigoted folks simply do not agree with Twitteratti on a plethora of issues, but that needn't make them evil, and banning them is not helpful
If you drive away normal centrist folks to gab, it is worsening public discourse, not to mention, Twitter's bottom line. One can agree to disagree without bans and elaborate shaming rituals.
This data suggests that, on Twitter:
18-29 are overrepresented by 8%
30-49 are overrepresented by 11%
50-64 are underrepresented by 7%
65+ are underrepresented by 12%
identified democrats overrepresented by 5%
identified republicans underrepresented by 6%
A 2016 Pew report (https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...) suggested the partisan affiliation deltas per age group (sorry--there's probably a better dataset to use out there: the age ranges don't quite align, and this is just registered voters) broke out like:
18-35: +12% democrat
36-51: +6% democrat
52-70: +2% democrat
71-88: +8% republican
1. This article doesn't say that Twitter (the company) has a liberal bias. It says that Twitter users lean left.
2. The article says absolutely nothing about this, and you haven't provided any evidence. This is pure conjecture.
3. Twitter users aren't forced to follow anyone in particular. There are plenty of timelines filled with conversations that look and sound like right wing "echo chambers", centrist "echo chambers", etc.