I do wonder how many people are staying on Twitter due to follower count alone. Having had an account for over a decade, I'd have previously estimated about 20% of my followers were dead accounts. Based on now leaving and making new accounts on other platforms, my estimate is closer to 90%.
As a blogger I've always known only like 1% of people who retweet/like a post actually clicked the link and read the article, but I assumed that was just a social media thing. Having experimented with basically every other platform, I learned it's more likely that a significant number of Twitter engagements are fake, and those that aren't don't really care enough to read your work, they'll just give you a retweet/like for appearances.
@malwaretech almost seems like we’re on here to defeat loneliness in a pseudo social world by being seen, even if this version of being seen is barely worth mentioning. Sometimes I consider giving up on the internet and residing solely in the physical world.
I get into way more conversation and interaction here than I did on twitter.
There are people I liked to follow on twitter, but I don't want to check to see if they're still there because I'll think less of them.
@malwaretech FWIW, my follower count was something like 150-200 (with an unknown but nonzero number of bots among them), built over 10? years or so. I didn't stay.
@malwaretech I never spent enough time on Twitter to know my way around, But I can say for sure that Facebook and Youtube have a lot of sock-puppet accounts. Youtube in particular has so many that they have conversations between themselves, trying to make a particular topic or opinion seem more popular than it really is. They are easy to spot though, at least for me.
@malwaretech If a tweet publicizing an article posted elsewhere has its own standalone value, there's no harm in retweeting it without reading the article.
FWIW, I routinely unfollow accounts that only hype something the account holder has written.
@malwaretech That 90% figure sounds about right to me. I'm getting more engagement here with just under 100 followers than I was on Twitter with just under 1000.
@malwaretech I don't care how many people read what I write - but I do care what I read. And in that aspect, my experience with Twitter was better. I left it only because Musk killed the old TweetDeck and the new one is so bad as to be unusable (and is only for paid members anyway).
@malwaretech for what it's worth I've been guilty of liking / retreating without reading. Mine is basically a lurker account on all platforms, but if someone who's opinion I generally agree with publishes on a topic I am interested in but I do t have time to read at the moment, I like and retweet. It boosts content I probably favor, and also gives me an easy way to find it later by going through my own posts
@malwaretech It wouldn't surprise me if Twitter themselves were creating fake accounts on their own platform in order to drive fake engagement to keep people convinced that they need to stay active on the site.
@malwaretech so now I’m afraid to favorite this (or whatever the star is called on mastodon) for fear of falling into that category you just described… and while I kinda feel like I click a lot of links, now I’m second guessing if I boost things based on headline alone.
@malwaretech many people need that follower count just for their ego they don’t care if they get followed by bots or dead accounts. The higher the number the better
@malwaretech I don’t personally care one iota about my follower count, but I do enjoy interactions. Twitter was a barely net positive, but after the sink arrived I neutered my account (removed all the people I followed). I stopped just short of deleting it as I like to refer back to old posts. However I don’t visit there anymore.
@malwaretech Twitter(x)’s new privacy policy starts 9/29. If all goes as plans, I’ll be off Twitter before then. Followers were part of what kept me there, but also I have many author friends there. Sadly, many of hose friends haven’t made the leap to Medium. The writing community on here is still growing, but I wish it would grow more quickly.
@malwaretech I find myself removing one (probably fake) follower a day on the HellBirdSite. I don't imagine I have a great following there. There are lots of like-minded people who - whether they know or care about me or not - I want to see succeed and survive the process over there.
@malwaretech I am not active on Twitter any more but I did keep my account in small part because of the follower count, yes, even though engagement has been shit. But two more important reasons are the people who are still there and that I have yet to figure out if my tweet archive still works when I delete my tweets. I used a parser that supposedly downloaded everything in HTML and MD format but I dunno if it's easily searchable like the archive that still connects to Twitter 😕
@malwaretech When I was using Deadbird, I would routinely block most people who followed me, after taking a look at their profile and posting history, because they did not look like real people anyway. That's one way to keep your follower count low 😎
@malwaretech I have a friend who relies heavily on a community they've built over the past several years and don't want to/are afraid to try building it back up elsewhere.
@malwaretech Twitter has its appeal and the only reason I am still there is certain content. I've not been able to replicate my tried and trusted sources on any other platform. With that being said, the quality of content is deteriorating quickly with it becoming difficult to sift through the trash. If more of the Twitter folks found their way here, it would not even be a comparison.
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