Twitter miscounted its daily users for three years straight

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/28/23046170/twitter-miscounted-daily-users-three-years-q1-2022-earnings

by dkobia • 4 years ago

30 14 4 years ago

crack down on spambots, and verify all users

This is the part that terrifies me. I enjoy my 'alt' accounts that have an anime waifu avatar and an assumed name. I don't want Twitter outing my real identity. That would ruin Twitter in a devastating way.

justanotherhn• 4 years ago

Outing your identity to whom? You must know that Twitter already knows about your alt accounts right? I wouldn't panic just yet, they will probably just derank unverified users in the replies of tweets so spam bots can finally die.

_moof• 4 years ago

Outing your identity to whom? You must know that Twitter already knows about your alt accounts right?

They aren't concerned about Twitter, Inc. knowing. They don't want other people on Twitter knowing.

addingnumbers• 4 years ago

You must know that Twitter already knows about your alt accounts right?

As the article says, the whole miscalculation comes from Twitter counting all your alts as active even when you were only using one of them...

raxxorraxor• 4 years ago

Wouldn't that fact be very important for a valuation of the company?

Perhaps this was the source of the panic? Would user numbers be subject to auditing in cases like this?

xhkkffbf• 4 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Musk turns around and lowers his bid. At least that's what I would do. But maybe he wants the company so much that he won't contest it.

maxlybbert2• 4 years ago

Musk’s offer explicitly didn’t demand this kind of data. I assume he figured that Twitter’s statements about its finances, number of users, growth, etc. were reliable and he didn’t need to do any additional due diligence. I thought it was reasonable at the time, and now I think he’s feeling some regret.

pdinny• 4 years ago

DAU and MAU are tricky metrics partly because even when they're known to be problematic (perhaps the definition of "active" is too permissive to be useful for certain purposes) they are very hard to change because they are reported at such a high level (frequently without relevant context such as whether or not they are counting accounts or users) so historical changes are trickier to get support for.

Also people want that number to be defined to yield the highest number because Goodhart's Law and we ship what we're incentivised to ship.

daenz• 4 years ago

Does this explain why followers have been fluctuating in a very unexpected way for high-profile accounts?

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

It's weird that it has been in both directions, with some accounts losing large numbers of followers but others making sudden large gains.

marcusverus• 4 years ago

The reports I’ve seen on this implied that (in general) left-leaning accounts were losing followers, while right-leaning accounts were gaining them.

Given that the coverage we’ve seen in various quarters (where the left generally fall into the “Elon buying Twitter is bad” camp and the right fall into the “good” camp), the changes in follower counts seem to be easily explained by a rash of rage-quitting left-wingers and a corresponding rush of right-wing Gab/Parler users giving Twitter another chance.

Twitter miscounted its daily users for three years straight

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