I don’t think that’s the potential intent or intended message. The PSF has both a reputation for how the non-profit wants to be perceived – both by members and potential donors – and what kind of community it wants to engender by what groups it gets associated with. I think the PSF has to decide whether being on X serves or goes against those goals/perception.
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In fact, I didn’t. I don’t have a good sense of the percentage of users on the various platforms that are bots. What are your estimates?
I can’t tell if you’re responding in bad faith, but in case you aren’t being intentionally obtuse, here’s an attempt at a serious response.
The prevalence of bot accounts and bot activity on Twitter/X is a well known problem and has been a research subject for more than a decade. It’s the subject of speculation because Twitter/X have a financial incentive to not disclose their own internal estimates.
“A bit of Googling” shows older estimates of around 15%-20% of accounts, and some more recent investigations suggesting 40%-60%. There is no universally agreed upon classification method so variation is unavoidable, but there seems to be some agreement about a general increase.
No one is seriously suggesting - as far as I can tell - that literally 100% of Twitter accounts are bots. This is a rhetorical device used for emphasis.Twitter being “full of bots” may be a meme, but it’s a meme for a reason.
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Assuming that half of X’s “users” are bots and that none of Bluesky’s are, that leaves X with 10 times the number of human users.
You were the first person to bring up Bluesky in this thread. I don’t see how its size is relevant to the topic of this thread, which isn’t about that site at all.
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For somewhat older research, go at ACL anthology, e.g. here: https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.954.pdf
Anecdotal evidence ranges from “the activity in my stream is 75 to 90% bots” (note messages, not users) to “don’t bother tweet unless you’ve got a bot farm to amplify your message 1000x”.
I think this all misses the point though.
PSF is the steward for the Python community, and it’s completely within PSF purview to decidedly state something like "Let’s move on from Twister to ABC. The community will follow.
Should the wise folks are PSF wish to base their decision on data, let’s do this:
- decide on a meaningful interaction, e.g. a Python survey
- host it ourselves, retain referral data to the legal extent
- publish this survey on all platforms
- measure interaction by platform
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The bigger platforms already provide lots of analytical data about interaction quantity and quality. I think we (PSF staff) will probably be focusing mostly on the data that is already available, rather than creating new data.
That said, we do also pay attention to community sentiment which is a lot harder to quantify. So I’m personally really grateful to everyone who’s been sharing their thoughts in here.
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For comparison, Debian just announced:
The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter. We took this decision since we feel X doesn’t reflect Debian shared values as stated in our social contract, code of conduct and diversity statement. X evolved into a place where people we care about don’t feel safe. You are very much invited to follow us on https://bits.debian.org , on https://micronews.debian.org/ , or any media as listed on Teams/Publicity/otherSN - Debian Wiki #debian
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This is well done, in that the announcement explains explicitly that the move is being made for the benefit of the community.
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Another angle worth considering is the trustworthiness of the platform in terms of fairly disseminating information. Distrowatch reported a few days ago that Facebook is removing posts with Linux-related links on the grounds of being “cybersecurity threats”. Of course, that’s Facebook, but it’s no secret that Ex-Twitter’s moderation policies have also been questioned, increasingly so of late.
No platform is free from “censorship”, partly because there’s a spectrum from moderation to censorship. Still, I’d say it behooves us not to rely unduly on platforms with opaque, capricious, or unresponsive moderation and content-removal policies. It’s no use building up some huge following on a platform if we can be rugpulled at some later date by a change to some mysterious algorithm. It makes more sense to me to try to build the audience on a platform that’s more robust in the first place than to double down on a large audience on a platform that’s less trustworthy.
(And, of course, all of the “send a message” arguments equally apply to this angle, in the sense that if we want to send a message via our choice of platform, maybe we also want to send a message of not supporting platforms that practice dubious or Orwellian content removal.)
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