Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet

So far for me there&#x27;s a single big use-case for twitter, and it&#x27;s the reason I went from a zero-tweeter to a &quot;gee I should look like a normal, respectable upstanding Twitizen(?)[1]&quot; user. For some very large companies, Twitter is apparently the best&#x2F;only medium one can use to communicate with them about issues (regardless of how important they are).<p>I&#x27;ve found that when I <i>don&#x27;t</i> want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I <i>do</i> I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone.<p>It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work.<p>The use case I&#x27;d <i>like</i> to use twitter for is trying out some jokes&#x2F;&quot;deep thoughts&quot;, but I don&#x27;t have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I&#x27;ll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it&#x27;s somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody.<p>[1] Wow that&#x27;s been a word for <i>at least five years.</i> I guess that&#x27;s not too surprising...

Being a nobody on twitter can be extremely frustrating if you&#x27;re tweeting and expecting anyone to pay attention.<p>I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I&#x27;m not surprised users avoid tweeting.<p>There&#x27;s kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.

My account is one of those 44%. I have nothing to say on Twitter, but having an account lets me follow the people that I want to. This still makes me an active user, though.

I use Twitter to get news and updates from a few sources. And in this case, the headline is like saying the majority of newspaper readers have never written a newspaper article.

The old keeps being new again.<p>Every time someone tries to create a new platform that will finally open up the Internet to the long-standing promise of widespread two-way communications, the same thing keeps happening: The platform turns into a broadcast medium where a few use it to promote something and the vast majority sit back and consume. BBS systems, E-mail, USENET, almost all message boards, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can change the protocol, make it Web-2.0, limit it to 140 characters, add AJAX, but you can&#x27;t change human nature.

A major issue was over looked - twitter @username squatting.<p>For example, I registered www.ameristartup.com a few weeks back. At the exact time I was creating the Facebook page someone else created the @ameristartup twitter account. To date the twitter account has remained inactive (no followers, no following, no tweets, no profile pic, ect...). I naively notified Twitter thinking they would have interest in curbing this type of behavior, but I received the form corporate response of f-off.

I have never send a tweet and just use it as a news feed. Is there anything wrong with that?

This makes a lot of sense. For most users, it&#x27;s a 1 way communication. Most of the 56% don&#x27;t say a lot either. It&#x27;s become very much a vehicle for people with things to promote.

To spin this positively, Twitter should be happy their platform is considered a &quot;medium&quot; and not just &quot;one-thing&quot; to all users.<p>The idea that your Twitter feed is an unfiltered firehose, and that you can use Twitter how you want (follow, tweet, or not) makes it all the more powerful and redundant to shifting consumer trends.<p>As long as Twitter doesn&#x27;t hork the various tools&#x2F;services used to access the service, no one should &quot;get sick&quot; or be fatigued by Twitter as there is not one standard experience.<p>A family member of mine just signed up for Twitter but didn&#x27;t want anyone to know for various reasons (they are not interested in gaining a &quot;following&quot;). They just wanted to follow a few folks&#x2F;entities they&#x27;re interested in and that&#x27;s it. This is a good thing ... Twitter remains &quot;useful&quot; without dictating how my family member and others has to use it.<p>The &quot;hands-off&quot; approach should also appeal to businesses looking to partner with, or provide tie-ins to the Twitter service.<p>I would argue the more lightweight and open-ended Twitter is in regards to how it works, the better.

I&#x27;ve created several accounts just for API access for various purposes. I wonder how many of those non-tweeters are dummy accounts for developers.

It is the best RSS replacement. Let&#x27;s me follow a lot of good sources, across multiple platforms. And not just sites, but individual, interesting people.<p>The DM feature? You can only message followers, kinda useless.

I gave up on Twitter several months ago. I never really got much out of it. I also quit using G+ after I stopped playing Ingress. Facebook is time-limited to 1 minute per day using the StayFocusd extension in my browser. I&#x27;ve also created email filters that send all social network notifications to the trash.<p>And that&#x27;s the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it&#x27;s far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail).<p>There&#x27;s a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they&#x27;ve discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn&#x27;t easily dismantled by a filter.

I have twitter, i find it useful. I follow local beer and burger guys. They always come up with great spots I&#x27;ve never been. Very useful. I also follow CEO&#x27;s, which is also very informative. Its rare I feel the need to tweet myself, but that doesn&#x27;t make me a less active user.

The &quot;stream&quot; concept only works if you have a lot of followers, which most people do not. For those with &lt; 200 followers the chances if anyone reading your tweet before it falls down the stream is so small that it becomes a waste to even try.

I use Twitter feverishly (probably too much) - I probably annoy a lot of my followers with non-sequitur commentary and the random news article.<p>But what I REALLY derive value in, is it&#x27;s my always streaming news source. Follow a dozen or so news sites (both local, world, and niche-focused, such as tech and marketing) and I&#x27;m always up to date on what&#x27;s going on.<p>A well curated Twitter account is going to beat out almost any individual news source.<p>While I do know Twitter botting is a huge issue, I also (anecdotally) know a lot of people who only use Twitter for consumption who have never tweeted anything themselves.

Considering the 1% rule of Internet culture (only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk), 44% sounds quite good.<p>Sites like Twitter and reddit (and HN, to a lesser degree) probably get a higher proportion of contributing users than your average forum or Q&amp;A site by lowering the barriers to contributing.<p>Reference: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...</a>

For me, Twitter works for hyper-local things. All the local media personalities live-tweet council meetings and the like, local politicians and businesses have active twitter accounts.<p>It&#x27;s great for contacting the public face of something in a fashion that makes it impossible to handle the matter privately. Every business or elected-official is super-gracious and accommodating on Twitter because the world is watching.

There&#x27;s still a use case for non-sending accounts. Compared to email Twitter is a nicer way to receive promotional info. Senders are forced the keep their messages short, and there&#x27;s no management time needed on the receivers part. I wish email headers would have a promotional &amp; auto-delete&#x2F;expire date tag for emails (of course it wouldn&#x27;t work as companies would ignore it...).

In my country noone uses twitter I know. I only used it once to message Digital Ocean why are they so slow. It worked out better than I expected, they responded in 5 mins and I could see others with the same problem. Other than that I really don&#x27;t know why would I use it. I think for me reddit multis are the perfect solution.

I assume that some (probably small) proportion of this 44% has used their account for direct messages, DMs, but these can&#x27;t be detected? Also, how are protected accounts factoring into these stats? I couldn&#x27;t find a link to the data itself and the article didn&#x27;t make it clear how these two factors are being handled.

To add to that, I&#x27;ve seen a fair number of short usernames with few or no followers&#x2F;following that were created early on. When I couldn&#x27;t find the ones I wanted, I gave up and used my own name.<p>I think a lot of those accounts were mopped up by folks who then lost interest or forgot their credentials&#x2F;lost email addresses etc...

I have a question:<p>If there is an dead account which never had any sort activity, is there some legal&#x2F;moral way to get its username? I would like to buy it, but owner does not respond. There is also no trademark violation, so I can not use official way Twitter handles this cases.

I&#x27;ve got less than 100 followers, most of them folks like @ToasterRepairDotCom and @PeoriaJobHunters<p>If I were to start sending tweets, I&#x27;d just be the electronic equivalent of the guy who hangs out on a bench in the park near my house muttering under his breath all day.

I don&#x27;t even understand how to get started with Twitter. I might know like one person in real life who actively tweets. My only real exposure to Twitter &quot;in real life&quot; is through using it to post status updates&#x2F;outages.

So this looks like a powerlaw curve with a fat head and a short tail. I don&#x27;t see this as a big deal - this means that 56% of people have engaged with a service. I think most people would be happy with that.

Using twitter just to consume information is perfectly legit

I have a twitter account which uses my &#x27;real&#x27; name spelling purely for the purposes of squatting on the name.

How many of the 13% of the twitter accounts that wrote at least 100 tweets are &quot;robots&quot;?

I&#x27;d be interested in how many of the ones that have sent tweets were from hijacked accounts.

this is a bit worrying, the news article claims that these are still active users regardless but as far as I know, I get random tweets from bots and strangers promoting their own thing and largely I don&#x27;t have a very active engagement with Twitter.

The other 56% are spammers.

Of course. Twitter is more of a media-consumption platform.

And those accounts have all the good usernames :(

I believe this.

By the way, is it any easier to get a handle that&#x27;s inactive for like 7 years?

with the amount of crap that the 56% spews, can you imagine the drivel overload if more of those 44% actually released their &quot;thoughts&quot; into the air?<p>also: who cares?