It would seem reasonable for large investors, -those who have influence on a company, to require MAU excluding bots figures as part of their due diligence. On the other hand: FOMO, guess.
The only economic actor directly hurt by bots is the advertiser, right? To some degree, it's against investors' incentives to attempt to strictly exclude bots.
Obviously in the longterm it hurts value, but "doing things that don't scale" creates a lot of degrees of freedom (user growth, cashflow, funding) that you can use to pay off your "tech debt".
I wasn't nearly senior enough to have any influence in something like that, but in the internal culture, MAU was seen as such a strong proxy for success that suggesting the metric was flawed would have been sacrilege. The company had big parties and put out press releases every time a multiple of 1 million MAU was hit. To point out that most of those users were bots abusing our service's free tier would be noticing the emperor had no clothes on.
Then more bots come in undetected and you have to rebase again when you find them. It's a continuous process. You need very understanding investors to pull this off. At the same time there's only so long you can sweep inauthentic engagement under the rug until someone calls you out for it.
I don't understand why investors don't ask for numbers that exclude bots. Or maybe they do, and we just don't hear about it? This isn't some unknown problem, right? Bots have been around forever and they are a problem in many platforms, not just Twitter-like platforms.
