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Comment by gonzobonzo | Hacker News Reader

I just checked their Facebook and X page. The X page is getting much more eyes. For instance, they posted their article "The FAA’s “Temporary” Flight Restriction for Drones is a Blatant Attempt to Criminalize Filming ICE" to both accounts. The results:

X: 1,500 likes, 50 comments, 846 shares.

Facebook: 58 likes, 8 comments, 22 shares.

Bluesky: 94 likes, 3 comments, 51 shares.

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Interesting indeed. The story doesn't seem to be radically different on TikTok. It goes up to 15K views, that's still 3 times less than X.

Seems clear while their reach has decreased over time, it's still the highest on X.

I do agree with the decision, but declining reach is not the primary reason, it is merely what got them over the line.

I think it has been proven again and again that these "engagement numbers" are a mix of bots, social media company itself trying to inflate the numbers, and real engagement. Unless there is an impartial third party, these numbers are there to attract advertisers. In this situation, I would trust the source themselves, i.e. account holders.

Yeah, the idea that this is simply, mostly or even partly about engagement/eyes is bunk on it's face. I'd even argue it a bad faith position to defend.

You realize these numbers are meaningless right?

Even if you assumed there isn't some Elon "like multiplier" being applied to these numbers, the amount of bot activity on X is staggering.

You have no idea how many humans are being reached without metrics about links being followed.

but the article opening with a paragraph saying "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out".

One can't justify quitting because the number is falling, and claims the number does not matter at the same time. or can it?

Much fewer bots on X than Facebook. I think you are completely wrong.

Are likes some ultimate metric? What kind of person of target audience keeps liking any post of anything that pops up?

No and no obviously, they dont target some desperate addicted teens

Likes are obviously correlated with the number of views a post gets. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.

That assumption is only true if there is no manipulation of likes. I believe that the presence of bot farms has been extensively documented by now, which should disprove the usefulness of likes on any social media platform nowadays.

I for one never understood github stars

Like I don't care about stars at all as a consumer as a developer nor as a repository owner.

You are making lots of assumptions when evaluating GitHub projects that you aren’t writing here.

GH stars can indicate: which of many forks of a repo might be the most active, which of many projects in a category might be the most used/trusted, the growth trajectory of a projects (stars over time).

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