Comment by dibt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dibt | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't trust Cory Doctorow's anecdotal evidence on Twitter usage. His Like/View ratio is very low, and overall engagement for someone with 486k followers is some of the worst I've seen.

Part of the issue is he spams his followers with retweets constantly, all day. People may not know they can turn off retweets for someone. They may just mute them, and continue to follow.

It's very much like Cory to write a long article about this when really what's happening is him and the people he follows are becoming more irrelevant.

23 likes / 8,722 views = 0.26 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1612122825288208387

44 likes / 9,384 views = 0.46 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611993024879554560

193 likes / 15,400 views = 1.25 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611976607845224451

44 likes / 29,300 views = 0.15 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611858168774098945

162 likes / 48,500 views = 0.33 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1610282255057813504

I had to scroll a long time just to get those 5 because he's constantly retweeting.

1.0 is what you would want. Anything around 0.5 or less is really bad.

He hardly has any replies to his tweets. IMO, replies and quote tweets are what people are using twitter for. He also links off twitter too much.

SocialBlade stats: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/doctorow/monthly

I think your numbers are off by 100x or missing a %.

23 / 8,722 = .0026 or 0.26%

And by a desired ratio of 1, do you mean 1%?

Elon's latest tweet has a like to view ratio of 180k to 20.2m, or 0.9.

You picked the most extreme example of any account. I'd bet Elon gets a lot of hate-follows. They won't like his tweets. You can see many real people replying to his tweets, so you can tell he gets plenty of engagement.

For others without much engagement (retweets/replies), like Cory, all we have to go off of is likes, views, followers. I don't disagree that we can come up with a more accurate formula.

Also, I gave percentages, so it's more like 0.9.

I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account and get similar numbers. The point is that Cory isn't an outlier or unpopular or anything. All twitter users are like this.

> I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account...

> All twitter users are like this.

That's the point. Cory isn't like all users. He has 480k followers.

The reality is very few of his followers engage with the tweets. He previously had engagement, he no longer has that engagement, and thinks Twitter is dying. It didn't help that he told his followers to go to mastodon.

I really think he doesn't play to the platform's strengths: succinct commentary. His whole career has been about long-form writing.

So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter, or 1% is fine, but if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?

That doesn't seem particularly reasonable. If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter

Ratio between 0.05% - 1% shows good engagement. I rarely see it above 1%. Those are 'viral' tweets. I've never seen 2% or more.

Ratio regularly dropping below 0.05% without lots of replies/retweets is bad. A low ratio could mean high views from bots (e.g. Musk) or other non-follower sources, so replies/retweets help to indicate there is healthy engagement. Cory doesn't have that.

> if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?

The 480k is his _potential_ reach.

You aren't entitled to reaching all 480k of your followers. They follow other people. Their feed has limited space.

Similar to how Youtubers tell people to subscribe AND enable notifications. Doing so shortcuts the algo. You can do the same on Twitter. If the small % of followers that see your tweets don't engage, the feedback loop of getting to more of your followers never kicks off.

This is obvious with well-liked accounts. More obvious when these types of accounts are private because the like/view ratio is a higher signal (ie no fly-by views).

> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

Not a problem. It's the nature of the beast. Only a small % engage. The likes create a feedback loop that gets more views, but rarely breaks above 1% likes/views ratio. You see the same limits to conversion rates in other areas (e.g. advertising or eCommerce sales).

That's 0.9. It's a percentage. 0.9 is not great, not terrible.

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