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Comment by CreepGin | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for the big advertisers, but as a small business owner, I'm more likely to spend ad money on platforms that take an active stance against bots. In general, advertisers (should) care about impressions by unique users, not total number of views.

I'm not sure about requiring an account to view contents though. That to me will just kill total usage across the board.

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The problem is this will reduce impressions by unique users as well. Once a user hits the daily tweet limit (easy to do if you scroll and view a few viral threads), they can't view any more ads for the day. A few viral or high engagement threads could significantly reduce your audience for 24 hours.

Additionally, if Twitter CTR is low, then you need a _lot_ of unique users to actually generate conversions. Low CTR + Low impressions reduces the value of the ad.

> if Twitter CTR is low, then you need a _lot_ of unique users to actually generate conversions

You don't want to on a platform that has loads of unique "users" and impressions if most of those users are bots, though.

Perhaps quality is actually better than quantity?

Pre-Elon the bot count was something like 5% of active users, meaning a broad approach like this will affect significantly more real users than bots. There are probably more fine tuned ways to reduce bots that don’t degrade the experience for your biggest users.

> Pre-Elon the bot count was something like 5% of active users

Is there a reliable source for that figure? Also, are we talking about 5% of accounts (active accounts/total accounts?) or 5% of pageviews or some other metric?

I'm struggling to see any incentive for platforms to be honest about how many bots they get.

Twitter reported in their financial statements that less than 5% of their monetizable daily active users were spam or fake accounts. They did disclose some errors in methodology in 2022, but not enough to make a substantial difference to that estimate. They shared their methodology for estimating with Musk’s acquisition team and with the SEC.

One can claim that Twitter was lying about this number. But if he could prove they were lying, Musk would have gotten out of the deal.

> Twitter reported in their financial statements that less than 5% of their monetizable daily active users were spam or fake accounts

If a human signs up for an account, and uses it occasionally, but there's ongoing automated scraping or posting using that account for a good chunk of the time - or more specifically "for the majority of the requests" - would we call that account spam or fake?

That sounds like a huge speculation/hypothetical — is there evidence that was or is happening?

To answer your question, it would depend on what the account was doing. Scraping abuse could likely be handled in a more targeted manner.

> That sounds like a huge speculation/hypothetical — is there evidence that was or is happening?

I've signed up for websites before, manually, and switched to using automated tools to download all the content. Certainly more efficient than downloading stuff by hand. Isn't automation the kind of thing most developers would do in this scenario?

If you're doing it right, the website doesn't even know. At least not until it's too late ;)

Aside: a friend of mine wrote a script to perform the online check-in whenever he flew with his favourite airline. He reverse engineered the airline's official app, and duly wrote his own (Perl!) script to do the same. It spat out a pkpass file which he could load straight onto his phone.

I agree to an extent.

The only metric that matters, and unfortunately the hardest one to measure, is conversion rate. Everything else - impressions, clicks, watch time - are just really bad approximations of real value.

_If_ Musk can establish Twitter as a high-conversion platform, he will succeed; however, that's a big "if" because I think this latest decision is a huge miss. I was on twitter for 15-20 minutes today and got rate limited. I'm not a bot.

Are enough people going to give Twitter $8 because of this to offset those who stop being active on the platform and driving ad views? I highly doubt it. I know I'm just moving on to doing other things instead.

Yeah, but twitter has more bots then ever. If you want platform without bots, twitter is loosing that fight on pretty much all fronts.

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