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Comment by JamesSwift | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter is supposedly not providing the data

Not really. Reading the letter it sounds more like Musk has started to make more specific requests, likely in the hopes of them not being able to service them. For example, he claims in the letter that he requested daily mDAU numbers for the previous 8 quarters (i.e. 2 years) and they only gave him rolled-up numbers.

I find it completely believable that they may not have a daily breakdown for 8 quarters, and so they can't provide the information requested.

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If you've ever run analytics at even a mid-sized company (let alone large, where it's even more critical to keep this stuff), getting daily mDAU is trivial and you'd have to have a grossly irresponsible data policy to be unable to pull that.

Nobody worth their wage drops data that aggressively unless they are compelled by law.

I dont have enough experience in analytics to know what data points would be full fidelity vs rollup. I'm just stating that theres no guarantee they even have the data to service his requests, and I dont believe they were under any existing obligation to maintain it before Musk got involved.

Stats get increasingly expensive and useless to store, but one would think mDAU would be one tagged for high precision long retention storage.

I mean, no? Why on earth would I want Thursday the twenty thirds mDAU from a year and a half ago? If it's not bringing value, it's costing money, and it's unlikely to provide value, so why keep it?

Because sometimes it costs more money to discard some data than it does to simply keep it.

When I was in mobile gaming we stored that data for way longer.... Do you really think twitter is throwing away user activity data?

I find it very hard to believe that they don't have this information graphed on a dashboard somewhere.

Depends on whether there was UII in the underlying dataset. It's probable that Twitter kept the mDAU numbers and probably shared them, and Elon's people asked for underlying data that aggregates up to that metric, so they can scrutinize the methodology.

However, saving user identifiable information > 90d is a challenge these days - you have to anonymize it, which defeats Musk's purported goal. (And it might be illegal to share that data w/ a 3rd party.)

When your enterprise value is predicated on user activity stats, you keep your user activity stats.

Because there’s no such thing as a regular Thursday at Twitter scale. Any number of things could have happened that Thursday or around it, major world event, Thanksgiving, last day of Ramadan or whatever. And you might have a valid data question regarding these events.

Heck, not only “what happens on Twitter each day of the week” is a very valid data question, but even by the hour.

Your right twitter might just be incompetent and not keep that data, but this would be one of the most basic forms of data you need for analysis when your entire revenue model relies on that statistic.

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