@malwaretech Great question. I was not on Twitter for 7 years for followers— it held a different type of “gravity.” A mystery still.

@malwaretech yeah i’m new here but i’m actually astounded by how active the conversation is, even at very low numbers. if i ever reached the same follow/follower counts i had on twitter i think it’d be overwhelming

@malwaretech /boosts for appearances/

@malwaretech A few years ago I had nearly 10k followers. Assuming 2k dead accounts and 5k accounts that rarely posted, that still left 3k with whom I had some potential contact, 100's of quasi- regulars.

All those numbers are way down now. I haven't found anything to replace it, although I do use mstdn, facebook, even linked in.

Trying to recruit followers to my substack, but it's a challenge. Oh well.

@malwaretech I think the higher potential for grift exists with a platform, the more fake or like-fake engagements will exist.

@malwaretech the reason Elon says he wants to charge the $2 per account is valid. Hackers inflate their egos and their reach by using bot accounts to follow their main accounts, and their friends accounts. They want to feel worthy of love so they falsely seek it online. If he did make that fee a ton of hackers probably would come here with their bots. Not one of them would be willing to pay half a million dollars a month (l know some accounts that have 170k bots) but they will probably come here

@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.

@malwaretech I like that you have a large enough dataset to draw some plausible conclusions, especially ones that jive with my assumptions, hah

@malwaretech the part I found the most odd were folks that claimed follower counts didn't matter were the ones most concerned about them.

@malwaretech

Have definitely been told by an organization that they need to stay there due to 10s of thousands of followers. A tool that makes it clear just how much those followers are no longer active would be super helpful. An argument for deleting one’s account, not just going inactive, is that people will continue to interpret inactive followers as reach.

@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 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
Do you ever wonder how it is possible for anyone to read all the tweets of the supposedly thousands of people they are "following".

@malwaretech

Yanno, sometimes, I've already read the article.🤷‍♀️

@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 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 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 agree. I'll add that upside of twitter for myself, and for many scientists, was the potential impact. The small % of actual persons who actually read the content and weren't hate following— members of that tiny cohort were oftentimes well-connected and in a position to do something with the information

@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 A decent amount of my followers came to mastodon, but not all.

I also set my twitter account to private. I might check sometimes, but very little when compared to mastodon/tiktok.

I got CONSERVATIVE ads despite a mostly liberal and LGBTQ+ feed. it's basically truth social but with actual users.

what compaq was to PCs, twitter is to social media. Carly fiorina killed HP, and elon musk is killing twitter

@malwaretech I tend to retweet some articles I don't read because I like the author and want to boost them.