Anyone have a view of the percentage of accounts that are likely to be fakes/bots? Is this even a thing? Or is there some sort of verification on sign-up?
Threads accounts are linked to Instagram accounts, so the same verification standards should apply. If there's one underrated thing Meta will do better than Twitter here, it's cut down on spam / bots used for astroturfing and algo manipulation.
1/3 of the accounts following me on instagram are bots… I get spam messages that try to get me to buy nudes every couple of months. I don’t think they’re that much better.
Whoah. I think the opposite. IG seems to me chock full of bots compared to Twitter, because you can't turn off the recommended feed in your face. I'm sure this mandatory recommendations thing will happen with Threads as soon as they feel like exploiting userbase.
No screen scraping involved actually - the data collection process is mostly manual. Can do a longer write-up on the methodology later tonight if there's interest.
Not related but I just wanted to say I love your site. I have seen previous things you have worked on from Reddit, I am always pleasantly surprised it is the same creator/s
I'm with you on that! I don't have space to cram more stuff in my life, my day or my head. Quite the opposite in fact, the more I toss overboard the better things get.
I think a better (but harder to obtain) metric would be activity. Given that people use their Instagram account, the user account isn't too relevant since you don't really need to sign up.
This can be a cool German tank problem type deal where you have a bunch of random numbered accounts and don't know what the top numbered account is and have to estimate how many total accounts there are assuming the accounts are numbered 1 to N.
