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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.

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Twitter now has daily outages where parts of it just don’t function and no one knows when we’ll experience a more serious one.

It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity.

That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates.

Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.

this was the same narrative pushed when most of the tweeps was axed, but the site has been running fine and has only grown in popularity.

Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all the mess they've made, yes.

The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.

It's actually faster now than it's ever been, especially if you're using it from outside of North America.

Search breaks for me all the time, and I need to manually refresh the site at least once a day. Also, I can only scroll on Musk’s twitter profile to his tweets from September.

I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.

All the Apple ecosystem developers left, all the neo-Nazis were unbanned to add subscriber numbers, I see 1-2 ads a day because all the respectable advertisers left due to the Nazis[0], and the For You page now regularly does things like show you tweets from locked accounts, circles you're not in, and people who've blocked you.

Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-perpetuati...

Wow, if the McDonald's marketing chief says Elon Musk is a nazi, it must be pretty serious...

You'll need a citation for this. I've been using it for years and haven't noticed any difference or outages.

"‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise" New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outage...

At least three times in the last two weeks I was unable to load images or threads or like tweets or post tweets. That’s three separate days where this functionality was unavailable. Using the official Twitter client. I’m in Southern California.

I use Twitter once a day and not every day.

I don’t have a monitoring service so this is the best citation I can offer.

In the last month I have experienced more issues than in the last four or five years if similar use.

I'm surprised to see people that can't see this (or are just Musk apologists)

The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of the tweets of people you were following and were supposed to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.

Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in the "For you" tab

"twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.

In my communities most people are double posting on mastodon and twitter. So much so that I only check twitter every few days for the stragglers.

I have multiple communities I follow on Twitter and the ones that don't care about the elon stuff, they do now.

Mastodon only has about 1.2M active users, so if most of your community is on there, it’s an unusual community.

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

Most of the iOS developer community has moved to Mastodon.

They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The community is what I care about, not the social media platform.

I mean sure, my mom doesn't have a masto account, she does have a twitter account.

It's down to posters vs reply guys vs rubberneckers. If those 1.2M active users are posters and higher quality reply guys, great.

Anecdotally it seems so. Further anecdotal, but I think I've seen one ad that was from a company I recognized that wasn't weird dropshipping stuff in the last few months.

It definitely feels less active and the conversation largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.

It feels this way to me, too; and just from a user perspective it feels better, too. Although it may not be financially sustainable.

My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?

> skews more toward talking than doing

Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the outliers worth following still seem to be there too.

Maybe their audiences are smaller. People that depend on their large reach on Twitter are going to be much slower to move on than those without audiences.

That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is greener.

What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact, this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.

I'm sure MySpace thought the same thing about their never-before-seen accomplishments. I suspect very few people knew what "something else" was in that case, either.

Is it really a conversation, though? I rarely see “thought leaders” actually engage with their audience in a meaningful way.

I'm not really sure what a "thought leader" is, but it sounds like someone that would feel at home on LinkedIn.

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