Elon Musk: Twitter usage is at an all-time high | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: Twitter usage is at an all-time high

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Difficult to evaluate this independently.

Before the acquisition, Twitter stated that it had to remove 500 000 inauthentic accounts a day. If the mass layoffs have reduced the company's ability to do that then the increase in spam accounts and traffic alone might be driving the apparent usage/mDAU increase.

It's possible some usage might be from people who left for Gab, Truth Social, and other platforms recreating accounts too of course, and it'll be interesting to see if that's the case and how sticky those are.

Anecdotally I'm seeing a lot of the non-US regular accounts I follow cut back on tweeting or leave entirely. It's also unclear whether that'll persist over the long term, but for now it's an interesting signal. Many of the US accounts have been temporarily more active because of the recent election.

A reasonable person could make the argument that there is a way to use Twitter without engaging with the worst of the internet, but the replies to that tweet are pretty gross, and the new owner of Twitter seems to think that's delightful.

A self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever saw one

So many twats tweeting about how bad the chief twat's been running the company and how poor the outlook is!

That's during this Binance FTX drama which is like a crypto twitter epic.

Funny how the mainstream media seems to focus on the one or two attention seekers leaving - as opposed to the actual data which shows the platform thriving.

It’s almost as if the establishment wants to pick a political fight with Elon…

Is there other data available? It seems like high usage data could be as much a indicator of rubbernecking as it is of the platform “thriving”. Additionally, do you think we can tell this early on if the company is thriving?

There's also ... an Election that just happened.

My guess is that the fortunes of twitter continue to be tied to the news cycle. When there are a lot of newsworthy events, traffic on twitter will increase, and when things quiet down, so will the traffic. This is not really something twitter can control, but I wouldn't be surprised to see high usage stats around the midterm election. The suggestion that Elon was intentionally creating drama in order to drive up usage stats is another one of those fun stories that probably doesn't have much behind it.

Nor do I see Twitter really growing a whole lot in terms of new users, as it's already saturated the market. The idea that outraged techies leaving twitter will materially affect usage stats seems implausible to me. A platform with ~300 million monthly active users isn't going to notice this. Earnings growth depends on cutting costs or selling subscriptions. In this sense, what Musk did was what anyone else would have done. My impression is that Elon Musk surrounds himself with drama wherever he goes, but that doesn't mean slashing headcount and raising subscription prices wasn't the way forward. It was probably the only way forward, but a lot of the drama is squarely on Musk.

I suspect it's more that taking billionaires down a peg moves copy.

At this point there's little reliable 'actual data' proving that, with us having to take Musk's word for it and his past penchant for winging it and exaggeration making that a risky proposition. Being a private company there's now also much less need for accuracy in public financial statements.

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