Vine was shut down by twitter.
For the record, Reddit had more traffic than Digg for many years before V4, it's just that Digg had more Windows users running the Alexa toolbar, so it was ranked higher.
We (reddit) visited Digg a little while before their V4 disaster and discovered (to the surprise of both teams) that our traffic was double theirs. Turned out most Digg users were also reddit users, but not the other way around.
The "v4 disaster" was the nail in the coffin where everyone left digg for good. Leaving digg for reddit became a meme in late 2008. It's no shock at all that by the v4 exodus in 2010 reddit was more popular. However 2007-2008 there were questions about which was a more compelling platform/format and which would foster a real community. By 2010 that question was answered, for sure, but "reddit always had more traffic but digg ranked higher cause toolbars" is borderline absurd.
My guess is both Elon and Jack will start to promote Bluesky with BTC at it's core for registration and ID purposes and prevent spam bots while offering a better alternative,
I called the mining collaboration between Tesla and Block/CASH last year during the price drop when Elon pulled BTC payment at Tesla; this makes sense they've both been on the receiving end of hostile take overs of their own companies and are heavily invested in BTC and have a strong view on how social media platforms have been going--Jack way more than Elon, Tesla and SpaceX but still a large holdings and stand to gain a lot from it.
I've never done social media, assuming HN doesn't count, and to be honest I'd consider playing with something like Bluesky if they move forward with it as I anticipate it will: if nothing else to see how the mechanics work.
Twitter’s format is fundamentally archaic.
I imagine the total addressable market (roughly) to be:
- humans with an internet connection
- Total their clock time
- Subtract all the time they are otherwise necessarily occupied (sleeping, working, etc. etc.)
The remainder is the time over which all media companies are vying. Twitter is competing against Netflix, Tiktok, physical books, etc. Some of these things can be done concurrently (watching Netflix while surfing the internet, listening to radio while driving), so add that time back or double it, whatever. But, basically, this is the state of play.
To say that Twitter is not competing against Tiktok, Snap, IG, etc. is to obscure the true state of play and competitive landscape. In 99.9% of cases†, you cannot scroll Tiktok and Twitter concurrently. So one or the other (or neither) is displaying ads to you. One or the other is generating revenue from those impressions. It is not really users over which they are competing. Rather, it is the ad inventory. The ad inventory is a function of time on site/app. Of course, ad inventory is definitely also a function of users–hence the focus on active users (xAUs). On that front, Twitter is a small fry[1]:
- Facebook (Meta): 2.9 Billion MAUs
- Instagram (Meta): 1.5 Billion MAUs
- TikTok: 1 Billion MAUs
- Snap: 557 Million MAUs
- Twitter: 436 Million MAUs
So, Twitter would have to generate a heckuva lot of engagement per user to generate anywhere near the inventory of other social media platforms. But we know they don't, as evidenced by their revenues and ARPU [2].
† I'm swagging here, but you get the point
[1] https://blog.hootsuite.com/snapchat-statistics-for-business/
[2] https://stockdividendscreener.com/information-technology/com...
Sadly, I think you might be more right than wrong for far too many people.
Though I do think the developed world would be better off if people consumed less media (and social media).
Twitter is relevant because a very specific audience of multipliers (particularly journalists, but also other influential public figures) use Twitter - often in person, while some marketing company runs their Facebook account. The public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network, even though those networks may nominally have a multiple of the number of users of Twitter.
Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter. The market doesn't get it, which is why it undervalues Twitter. However, you cannot blame the market for that; it is poised to undervalue Twitter, because the actual value of Twitter is not accessible to just anybody, but people like Musk, who are well-connected in the Twitter social graph. Hence the value of Twitter to someone like Musk is actually much larger than the value of the exact same Twitter to any random shareholder.
You think this is why he's interested. He has not actually said this, correct?
Another plausible explanation is that it is his preferred social media and its (relatively) cheap because it is very poorly run and thus its growth and financials suck.
You maybe right about Twitter having outsized relevance with respect to its user base, but I'm absolutely not buying that "the public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network". Meta's platforms reach BILLIONS of people.
Yes, but most of these are leafs on the (imaginary) unified global social graph.
Twitter's active users are much more likely to not be leafs, but multipliers, some able to reach even people completely out of reach of any social network (by transporting a story over to other media, like print or TV). And considering that even Facebook only has a minority of the world's population among its gigantic user base (and an even smaller minority among its active users), the ability to reach out to other media through Twitter is extremely valuable, in my opinion even more valuable than the ability to reach the giant Facebook user base directly.
The audience, or in other words the public, always catch up and move to the next dominant platform. This is one reason why I think arguments about network effects are one to be taken with a grain of salt. The public will go wherever the content is. Twitter's audience is not going to remain as valuable as it previously was (ahem, mismanagement may be one reason for this).