Ask HN: Are people losing interest in Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are people losing interest in Twitter?

7 pointstusslewake7 comments

I don't check Twitter very often these days, but today I looked through the feeds of some people I follow (mostly academics, writers, and software people) and noticed that many who were formerly quite active (5+ posts a day) had stopped posting often in the last 4-6 months. No self-declared Twitter breaks, they just seem to be fading away. Does anyone else have the sense that longtime users are becoming exhausted by the platform and turning away? If so, where are they going?

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Twitter actually reports active users as part of their quarterly report. Here’s the most recent one: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809121... (find for “Monetizable Daily Active Users”).

They don’t always break out the behavior of cohorts over time or minutes spent on the site. That said, total userbase growth is slow enough that meaningful changes in behavior (like lots of existing users logging in or tweeting less) would manifest as fewer DAUs. So far, it hasn’t; both US and worldwide DAUs are still growing at about the same (fairly slow) rate that they have been for years.

tl;dr: available data says probably not.

I had to step away for mental health reasons, I found myself just outraged all the time and helpless to do anything, even curating the feed by unfollowing a bunch of people didn't eliminate the issue, so staying away seems to be the best bet.

Same here. Twitter was great for staying up to date on projects that I wanted to follow, but it just got so divisive that I had to give it up. Shame seems to drive a lot of content and engagement on Twitter.

Yes. It’s gotten very tiresome. Other than those using it for business purposes it’s pretty vacant of any meaningful content.

I feel I'm too old for Twitter (50). But what does that mean? It means I don't use it to engage. It's still one of the most important feeds of information and entertainment in my daily life.

not at all. I see polticial/pundits accounts getting 2-5x more likes, retweets, etc. comapred to a year ago. Covid, increaed poltical division, culture wars etc. have really amplified usage.

It may be that some user types are growing while others are shrinking.

My use has gone down dramatically

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