Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.
I use Twitter through a browser and ad blocker and the content is borderline dogshit as it is. I use it because inertia means the things I want to find are still represented there. But it can’t be long before some major accounts move elsewhere, or deprioritize their presence. I’m thinking mainly of news orgs, but NGOs and governments might move too.
Weird. I’ve never seen Twitter more hostile to visitors and potential new users. And if you happen to register to a new account you will be welcomed by even more hostility from trolls and seasoned users. It’s just a terrible experience.
I noticed that as well. Every once in a while there will be a link to something interesting om Twitter, but you only get basically a screenshot. If you try and do any other viewing you immediately get pushed for sign in.
Actually yeah, why would if you are new to Twitter would you go through the effort of signing up and beating your head against the wall to try and find some community on Twitter when you could just avoid it?
You can’t just scroll around and check it out before you create your account. Your home page is probably artificially filled with the nonsense garbage of the owner making his own big statement and the ads you can see are for ball tanning, so you aren’t even sure you cAn trust the sponsors.
If you were young and not yet on it, why would you join unless you want to argue with assholes or try to get someone to lend you some crypto because you think it will get you out of your shit life.
Right? It feels more like they are trying to hide the toxicity of their community.
Oh no, how will people know if their opinions are right or wrong without our top most social ethicists?
For that I can give you a handy twitter analysis you can apply to every comment you write:
Your opinion is wrong and probably racist.
Eh I’ve been reading this headline forever.
Call me when it’s Myspace.
Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.
Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.
Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO.
Nah. “X” had $Billions in cash from the buyout deal + loans. X will simply not fall until all that cash dries up, and they reach the end of their loans. Even then, Elon Musk can just command Tesla to buy a whole bunch of Twitter-advertisements to transfer money to Twitter/X and keep the party alive a bit longer.
I don’t know how long it will last. But Elon Musk was over $200 Billion in assets when he bought the company. He’s lost a ton of that money, but Elon Musk still has a long way to go before he runs out of options. It does seem like Musk’s wealth is collapsing before our eyes however (their big bet on China / Gigafactory Shanghai looks like its about to go bad this quarter), but I don’t expect X to fall until after Elon Musk runs out of money.
There’s a lot of money that needs to be deflated / lost before this whole thing collapses. But like gravity, it should be inevitable. No one can lie, steal, and cheat money forever and get away with it IMO, eventually people catch on. But it can last for more decades than people expect.
X marks the Nazi
Weird, whenever I browse twitter I see loads of people of all kinds tweeting things.
It’s almost like “fewer people” is a distinctly different concept from “nobody”.
People on mastodon and lemmy keep saying twitter is dead, but it’s actually very active.
One of the idiots that replied to that comment of mine literally said they don’t go there anymore but looked at me like I’m some kind of idiot for just saying that people are still tweeting. Out of the two of us, I’m the one who still goes there, they don’t go there anymore.
So who do you think would know better about what’s going on on twitter as of late?
- The post you responded to didn’t say that Twitter is “dead”.
- People who still use Twitter are, in fact, idiots.
- NBC News does seem to be a more credible source than you on this topic.
As for me, it should be dead. I’m tired of having people link Twitter, as if any good person will join a discussion on there. It’s a digital parasite feeding off ad revenue and it should be taken down so people stop linking to it and posting on there.
What do you mean Albuquerque has fewer people than NYC? One time I was at this cafe in Albuquerque and it was packed!
“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” - Yogi Berra
Because the algorithm will always try to fill the timeline with something. It’s not going to show you empty spaces where tweets WOULD have been if people who left had been there.
I don’t see any empty spaces.
Yes. Because the algorithm fills them with tweets from other people. That’s why it seems like there are still the same number of people there even though there aren’t.
Right? I browse Twitter a lot and whenever I do I just kidding no I don’t.
Whenever I browse Twitter I do it because others link to it
spoiler
, and a lot of porn originates from there
. I’m glad that people are moving away, because that means these not as many people will use it as a primary source, and post art and other stuff somewhere else.
Good. Come to mastodon.
Edit: wtf is bluesky?
Bluesky
You mean boneless fediverse?
Mastodon
Duck season.
Less filling.
Wabbit season!
Duck season!
Wabbit season!
Duck season!
No.
Why?
I don’t think mastodon will be around in a decade, while I can easily imagine bluesky being around in 20.
Mastodon is just one platform used to access the Fediverse. I agree, Mastodon might not be the hottest Fediverse microblogging app in a decade, but the Fediverse will certainly still be around. And that’s what you should really care about.
Don’t go to Mastodon specifically, just go to the Fediverse.
Bluesky will be around as long as there’s a company behind it. If it’s not profitable, it’ll cease to exist overnight. Activitypub will be around as long as people enjoy it, which is a lot more sustainable.
Misskey or one of it’s many forks is good too
Even of nobody uses twitter , he got the money to keep it running for next 100 years.
Not really. His wealth isn’t in money, it’s in shares of companies like Tesla. If Tesla drops in value his wealth drops. If he sells shares in Tesla to subsidize Twitter, the value of his remaining shares in Tesla drops. Which is why he borrowed a lot of money from the Saudis to acquire Twitter. Using Tesla shares as collateral. Tesla stock is crazy overvalued, and he’s leveraged it to shit. It’s possible Elon Musk could be bankrupt in a couple of years.
I see a lot of “if”
Tesla is down 31.23% YTd
Normally it would be “he won’t do that because it would be completely stupid.” But since we’re talking about Elon Musk, it’s gotta be “If he does this stupid thing here’s what could happen.”
I need someone to tell me why Musk won’t be a huge buyer of DWAC when it opens. How much of Truth Social would he need to get it merged with Twitter, which would get Trump back on the platform. Musk gets to help out the psycho conservative right and he gets to help himself.
It would get attention, but can that attention be translated into ad revenue? So it doesn’t really help Musk out, and would be a bad move. So it seems like a stupid thing to do. So he’ll probably do it.
Trump is a meta-generator; there are articles critical of the articles critical of his coverage. Anyone could sell ads under a Trump tweet. How many real people joined Truth Social just to follow Trump, and more just to be able to see what the orange bastard spewed? There’s a reason pre-Musk Twitter bent over backwards to keep the shit-flinging orangutan on their platform.
If Musk does nothing, Twitter dies in a slow spiral. He has to do something. What better way than to get a guy who people can’t stop paying attention to, a frontrunner in an election season? The man gets clicks. If he’s already dropped $44B on Twitter, what’s another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?
Imagine Trump posts something about “killing immigrant vermin” and there’s a Nike swish with the slogan “Just Do It” beside it.
How much money do you think advertisers will pay when this is a possibility?
You’re thinking solely in terms of getting attention. And yeah no doubt Trump being on Twitter would get attention. The question is how do you turn that attention into revenue?
If he’s already dropped $44B on Twitter, what’s another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?
You’ve jumped to the conclusion that this will save Twitter. The problem is that this will get attention (which actually costs money in bandwidth) without a clear way to make money off of it. So he’d be spending billions on something that would not get him back into the good graces of advertisers and probably cement the inevitable destruction of twitter, not save it.
Like I say, it’s Elon Musk so the fact that it’s a bad move means he might actually do it.
It might help if they didn’t put all their efforts into killing Nitter and other useful frontends.
Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square"
He says it so clearly here which makes me wonder how people don’t realize it:
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
A private company that is in control of who is allowed to talk and what they are allowed to say. A private company that even decides what you hear and see while walking the square. Meanwhile also shovelling ads in front of you while you try to find the people you actually want to engage with.
“Social” media owned by private corporations is not social. Such media is anti-social, corporate control of public spaces that ought to belong to the people, just like they mostly do in real life.
Totally on your page, but what you’re describing sounds kinda like times square.
I’ve never been there so don’t know really. But it does seem full of ads and not very social either.
And to top it all off, it’s run by this guy in particular.
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.
I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.
I think it describes it well.
Ah in this town square metaphor, don’t forget the private company’s CEO has a megaphone and talks over people, and outright kicks them out of the square if you hurt his feelings.
Maybe his idea of a town square is more like a place for Nuremberg rally events.
All the while being fellated by feline feces, white nationalists, and dox-happy anti-LGBT bigots who celebrate the suicides of oppressed minorities.
Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).
It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.
I maintain the Saudis gave Elon the loan, even if he never pays back a dime, to keep another Arab spring from ever happening again.
Right wing “free speech” spaces tend to crash and burn hard. If they don’t moderate blatant racism and shitty behavior, the white supremacists drive out all the sane people, but if they do moderate, then shit stains like Tim Pool will start casting massive amounts of FUD onto the platform and claim that it has “gone woke” and isn’t a true free speech platform.
It’s something you see endless repeated. When there is no rules, you get the loudest, baddest, pieces of work, rise to the top and then set rules that favour them. Look over the world and history, where law and order has broke down, war/drug lords take over.
I lived in Holland for a bit, my Dutch colleagues told a story of the bus system. Holland tried a honor payment system, trusting people to pay what they needed to for their trip. It failed hard and was replaced with fair collectors my colleagues called “the bus Nazis”.
The same thing happens with free speech absolutism. You hit “Paradox of tolerance”.
Anarchy just doesn’t work. You need rules for everyone to play nice by.
Now that you mention Paradox, I think we need neural parasites to turn us into a well ordered hive mind like in that Paradox Interactive game known as Stellaris. 🧐
I mean look at how self checkouts are now looking at putting a hold of $100 on your card you use or Walmart requiring that you are a subscriber of their plan so they can hunt you down if you steal stuff.
It’s cheaper for sure to just let people do whatever they want, but people suck and mostly just care about themselves. And we really don’t care about the minor rules when those making them feel like they have all the power.
Humanity works when it’s the people all agreeing to shared set of rules and interacting with each other to keep it in check.
Yep, “Tragedy of the Commons”
For Twitter I’m apparently also a turbo user, as I get loading errors every day, after opening a few tabs quickly. Then it takes a while before I’m unblocked. Before Elon bought Twitter this never happened.
Of course engagement is down, nobody wants to post anymore when most replies are spambot nonsense and cheech and chong gummies ads. It is still the best place for breaking sports news and my feed is highly curated to only see what I want.
Don’t forget the endless “Pussy in Bio” advertisements that are now filling up most feeds.
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