@KneaverChat a handle from Kneaver Corp., managed behind the Open Twitter Chat Directory produces statistics on each chat above 200 tweets in total. I’m taking time to examine each feedback specially when numbers are reported as exaggerated. Last week I had one on #Luv4Social, a polite, considerate one. I felt I should take a closer look. 1) I check the code to see if some error or glitch could have occurred It’s all fine. After two years it still up-to-date with Twitter API. However lurkers favoriting tweets where counted as participants, I removed that although favorites were not taken into account globally due to Twitter API restrictions. I update the service and run the computation again. Remember that Kneaver is not just doing a hashtag query and summing up. It analyzes conversations. Kneaver chat rebuilds the conversation and try to make sense of it. Still 250 participants :) 2) I extracted the list of participants (the ‘view’ option of the script). I check the last one. A user with 0 followers, following one person and few a few dozen of tweets. A picture of him, it looks fine. He has been on twitter for 90 days already. This user is not following the person who tweeted during the chat. Yet he retweeted. https://twitter.com/78bularaw/status/642049610140241920 As such he is counted as a participant. He wouldn’t be listed, nor featured. He will not appear in recaps. This tweet had 130 retweets hence likely adding 120 participants to the chat. Three options: - He retweeted more or less at random something Twitter displayed to him. - He was just tuning on twitter randomly, get into the topic and retweeted. - It’s a bot trying to get attention. honestly, I doubt. 3) Question: should we filter out such participants, under which criteria? - Don’t count pure retweeters as participants. Some chats will see their audience melt. - Don’t count pure retweeters with less than x followers, x days on twitter - Count based on reach (a notion I dislike as it’s purely mercantile and doesn’t prove anything). I feel that taking this approach is contrary to Twitter’s principles of open streams, everyone can participate in his own way or even just lurk for a while. Millions of users are like this occasional Twitter users. On a chat, everyone should count for one, new users like stars. I suggest to delay counting as participants someone who retweeted a single tweet. In the above case, we went down from 250 to 32 :) 220 retweets each from a different tweeps. Should I validate this change? Let’s give it a try for a week. NB: In this change we also introduce a discount for retweets compared to tweets for featuring the most active participant. Their retweets don’t appear the number given for them. We also add tweets and retweets in the count and mention how many retweets are included as opposed to giving two separated counts before. NB: Note that tweets from the hosts are counted but not their retweets.