What I Think about Star Wars

wasn't sure where to toss this, so i'll just dump it here in the catch-all thread.

i did a little experiment with my personal twitter account starting August 17. i went through and muted every account that used the hashtags #RuinJohnson, #NotMyStarWars, #LastJediAwful, #TheLastJediAwful, #BoycottIX, #LastJediBad, #TheLastJadiBad. i did a series of mutes each day until the feed lines of these tags was silent.

here are some interesting observations:

• the tweets went back all the way to december of 17, but thinned out very quickly after the first couple of days of muting (during which i probably muted half the total number). subsequent days saw fewer and fewer tweet suggesting the same group using the same sets of hashtags.
  
• i can't get an exact count of how many specifically Star Wars related mutes i did (i know, i should have counted), but i estimate (based on my account), that i muted between 425-450 accounts.
  
• 28 of those accounts were very clearly just "hate" accounts made for the sole purpose of bashing on Star Wars (with user @ names such a ruinjohnson or star_wars_is_dead; that sort of thing).
  
• 1 account had swastikas in the user name (charming). : o p
  
• 6 were podcast and film review channels that seem to hate a lot of other stuff too.
  
• the rest of the folks seemed relatively normal otherwise.

twitter has an estimated population of 17 billion. let that sink in.

obviously not all of twitter watches or cares about Star Wars enough to tweet and hashtag it, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 sane people just randomly hating on Star Wars with the specific hashtags in a social media pool this big strikes me as pretty low, really. and the number may actually be lower because i swept up a bunch of gamergate people in the process (probably 25 or so), and also had a bad afternoon and muted about 50 non-hashtag-using people who said hateful things about Resistance. also, i might have accidentally swept up some folks who were using the hashtags ironically (though i tried to be careful not to).

this is in no way scientific and there are likely other hashtags out there i'm overlooking and also plenty of haters still hating. all good and well.
but my twitter feeds are a delight now, and i can immediately see the impact every time i click on Johnson's feed to see who has responded to him. XD
what was most interesting to me is that immediately after day two most of the people who used the most popular hate tweets had been muted and the rest was just trickle-in folks using variation tweets. on the last day i muted, i was trying to come up with other phrases and tried #firekennedy, but apparently there's some sports scandal with a coach named kennedy so i abandoned that one after culling just a handful of tweeters.

anyway, i just thought i would share this with all of you in case it might be of interest.