I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again.
Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?
As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
> Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings:
>We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
>... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications.
Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
This doesn’t resolve the issue the article has though. I’m a mDAU because I’ve logged in, yet there is no way for the people writing the article to know that I’m active.
They could maybe use like activity in addition to just tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then an external organization isn’t going to have insight into that.
I would imagine Twitter would have access to analytics that third parties don't have, which would allow them to pretty easily work out which accounts are logged in and used for browsing and which are actually abandoned.
Opening a Twitter link in a private tab is the low complexity solution, or there's nitter.net, or deleting cookies, or various browser extensions that delete cookies for you.
After posting that, I went back and retested. It looks like they have swapped back to a soft nag popup. For a few months it was hard blocking any further scrolling, at least with Chrome.
I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again.
Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?