Ask HN: What Happened to Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Twitter?

4 pointsWallyFunk9 comments

I setup my Twitter account in 2010 and have amassed ~12000 followers. People seemed to like my stuff, and I made a lot of friends (tweeps) on there in the process. I'm still just as active, but I've noticed a sharp decline in engagement with my account. Retweets, hearts, and replies have all dwindled, everyone seems too busy and focused on whatever flavor-of-the-month celebrity or political figure is tweeting.

They don't care about small little niche accounts anymore. It's all about k-pop and African memes, and replying to Elon Musk's tweets and other fandom. People just don't seem to have the time to focus on the smaller accounts.

I mostly tweet web development stuff, and was seriously considering pivoting to another topic just to get back that original engagement that I used to enjoy. And further, the web development scene now has countless copycat accounts doing 'threads' where they explain basic HTML/CSS/JS and other concepts, and the engagement for that is pretty high.

But it's basic stuff you can just read in various man-pages/Docs and just re-cycled for Twitter to get likes and clicks. It's not groundbreaking research or niche content, or, original in any way.

So what's happening here? Should I delete my account and re-spawn somewhere else where I've a greater chance at being heard?

BTW: I'm not revealing the account in question for privacy reasons.

I'm not sure what problem you're experiencing here.

Your engagement has dropped (likes and clicks, etc) because people are engaging with other accounts that are just there to get "likes and clicks" so you want to delete your account and start over in order to get more engagement (likes and clicks)?

Is this correct?

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/grow-your-twitter-account-...

It seems like you have told us what has happened to twitter? People don't care anymore about the things that made you popular. The userbase that used to follow you has probably moved to different platforms.

Anecdotal rant but I believe it is generally true.

I am 42 and until 3 years back I was quite active on Twitter. And I know many many accounts (from different demographies, personally unknown to me), were also quite active back in the day. I gradually stopped using Twitter in 2020. Few days back, I again logged in Twitter as I was bored. I found out, most of the accounts (except for big and famous accounts) I follow have also gone mostly silent. They haven't tweeted in months/years.

Similarly, in my real life, many were quite active on FB. They too have gone silent.

I guess every platform has a generation and growth period attached to it. After a while, these platforms go out of fashion. New generation moves to new platform.

Additionally, these days nobody likes to read. Short videos are the flavor of the season. Facebook killed the long editorials/articles/news pieces. Twitter killed the Facebook length posts. And now short videos/memes have killed everything else.

I kind of have similar problem, except I completely avoided twitter for months because it made me less productive, and now I feel a bit out of place, I’m guessing most people just got tired of news content , they have twitter spaces and twitter circles as new features, it could be many people now are only tweeting within their circles.

It's "the algorithm" has reduced your exposure in the timeline.

I'd wait and see what happens with the new ownership.

Maybe your content is already covered by many people or it is not engaging anymore. Anyway, you may experience a loss in audience as people avoid using Twitter for useful stuff each time more.

Pictures, videos, or pain text tweets do the best. Embedded tweets or links do worse and are not promoted by algo as much compared to pictures or plain text.

You can buy likes and clicks if thats what you are after

Reply on news.ycombinator.com