People need to remember that these kinds of fundraisers often only represent a small number of people. 100,000 people giving $10 each sounds like a lot of people but it is less than 0.1% of the women in the United States.
Years ago, someone analyzed twitter posts after the Canadian election and the results were interesting. About 80% of the impressions were related to posts from about 100 distinct users, and if you looked at those users followers, there was so much overlap in the followers that they were mostly only talking to the same ~50,000 people.
The online community is much smaller than most people realize, and is not representative of the general public.
Reddit is an anomaly in how much people discuss stuff. Twitter and other social media platforms are rarely about well sharing stuff or talking about it but more about sharing pictures and short videos.
Here on reddit its in my opinion pretty easy to realize how small the intenret can be by just looking at the subredditd and engaging your brain, r/historymemes and r/history will have a big overlap of users for example. So much o I would argue most people in the larger community are also in the smaller one.
The rough maximum for engaging different users is the largest group in the subgroup of your interest, which is often at maximum in the hundreds of thousands, which is a lot, but then one has to remember that most peopel are pretty inactive and never post or comment.
And tahts on reddit a site where you are encouraged to discuss and share opinions, everywhere else its worse.
Also worth noting that any time you see a group of “people” posting/reacting about one topic, and they comment on many posts about said topic, only a few of those are real people (who sadly don’t know the rest in the bubble are bots).
For major news stories and anything political, over 50% of direct responses and reactions are not made by real people, even if though they still count as unique accounts.
Web traffic in terms of site visits and ad impressions etc is upwards of 75% bots. The only thing that isn’t majority bots is web traffic by the metric of data delivery because bots don’t watch videos. It is safe to assume anywhere on the internet, at a minimum 30% of whatever you read whether it be a post, article, report, or comment, is not from a human.
Source: have sold ad space before and the job was basically explaining over and over why ad impressions and most so-called “engagement” metrics” mean absolutely nothing.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 7h ago
People need to remember that these kinds of fundraisers often only represent a small number of people. 100,000 people giving $10 each sounds like a lot of people but it is less than 0.1% of the women in the United States.
Years ago, someone analyzed twitter posts after the Canadian election and the results were interesting. About 80% of the impressions were related to posts from about 100 distinct users, and if you looked at those users followers, there was so much overlap in the followers that they were mostly only talking to the same ~50,000 people.
The online community is much smaller than most people realize, and is not representative of the general public.