11
JsonBoa
1y

Someone created a 0-followers private Twitter account and posted something to try out the new views count feature.
It raked dozens of views in a couple hours.
HOW?!?

Source: https://twitter.com/briggityboppity...

It looks like a funny data reverse-engineering exercise, so let's try and figure out what is going on.

Hypothesis 1) it is the OP's own views.
Reasonable, but unlikely if what OP says about not checking it for hours is true.

H2) It's some background job in OP's device that is refreshing OP's own latest tweets, so even without human interaction technically H1 is true. It would be some really shoddy engineering to count eye-less page views, but that's also what managers would demand.

H3) it's some internal Twitter automated function like back up, replication, indexing and word count.
See H2, it would be even dumber to count that as page views.

H4) it's some internal human reviewing for a keyword that could be associated with porn (in this case, "butts"). Really? dozens of humans to review a no-impact single post? They would have to employ hundreds of thousands of reviewers.

H5) it's some page-loading shit, like thousands of similar tweets get stored in the same index hash page and end up counting as a view in all of them every time someone loads the index page. It would be like counting every hit in the namenode as a hit in every data asset in it's Hadoop partition, or every hit in a storage block as a hit in each of it's files.
Duuuumb and kinda like H3.

H6) page views are just a fraud to scam investors. Maybe it's a "most Blockchain transactions are fake" situation, maybe it's a "views get more engagement if you don't think a lot about it" situation, maybe it's a "we don't use the metric system to count page views" situation.
All of them are very dumb.

Other hypothesis or opinions?

Comments
  • 1
    Scam views. There was already questions about the number of bots on twitter. Last I heard it was a huge number. Twitter was not forthcoming and that is why there was contention before the buy.

    I see bot farms hitting reddit as well. Groups of bots/npcs will swarm subreddits for like a couple of hours and then disappear. It is really wild. They are generally always negative and attack other users.
  • 2
    @Demolishun that would most likely be the case for a public account, but can bots enter a private account?
  • 2
    @JsonBoa probably as Twitter might have own bots.

    That would be my assumption, cause that's how Twitter makes money.
  • 2
    @IntrusionCM H3 does seem plausible, but it would be incredibly misleading to count internal automated tools as page views. Those are internal, one could easily ignore.
    But... yeah, it can be a deliberate attempt at propping up engagement metrics to flex at anxious marketing execs.
  • 1
    @JsonBoa Good point. Not sure on that.
  • 3
    @JsonBoa well. According to my bleeding ears a certain CEO fired a whole lot of stuff and seems to execute one retarded plan after another... Might have something to do with that.
  • 1
    Better days
  • 0
    I forget
    Used to know oh well more important things
  • 0
    You realise people search by "latest" VERY OFTEN right? (me including)
    I've seen tweets getting "born" lol like "10s ago" kinda thing

    Views would prob be from that
  • 0
    @azuredivay H1 is reasonable, but on a *private* account it could only be counting the OP's own views. Shoddy work to count the same person seeing the same tweet dozens of times in a couple hours. Those are not unique page views.
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