Twitter / X is losing daily active users. CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it
mashable.com
mashable.com
But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...
My impressions of the alternatives:
* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.
* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.
* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.
Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.
Also isn't that the point of a micro-blogging platform that the discoveries are made through the “retweet” of the users you follow? For years that used to be the main way discovery worked on Twitter, before they moved to algorithmically curated feed (which became full of “high-engagement” crap pretty soon).
For reference, retired American football player and sportscaster Troy Aikman has 1.5M followers.
To be clear, I’m only offering an interpretation, not my personal opinion. I currently sit on ten invite codes for Bluesky. Among my friends I’ve offered to that have declined, I get the impression that they’re in “wait and see” mode. At least one has told me as much explicitly too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKCuDxpccYM
I get that he is controversial. There are plenty of things to criticize Musk for. We can talk about factory conditions, replacing humans with robots, various political takes... But lumping him in with climate change deniers? That is so bonkers to me.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter can just keep being Twitter... as long as it does it over there.
I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.
Twitter was constantly criticised for never living up to its potential; features, growth, revenue.
Now people are complaining that Twitter isn’t like it was.
The world has moved on I guess.
Do people generally have the energy to get engaged in new social media networks.
Dark social is where my activity is. Almost nothing is public these days, for me and my friends anyway.
If you join it, it will already be less niche. Instead, you advocate using the product of another monstrous company.
1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.
2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.
and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).
Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.
- Truly vapid blue check tweets dominating most replies.
- Accounts I don't follow being inserted into my feed
- Tweets not loading, or other technical problems
The nail in the coffin for me, if implemented: Forced paid subscriptions (https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-charging-for-tw...)
the forced paid subscriptions thing was confirmed by elon to be fake news
This would be the same guy who claimed it _in the first place_? I mean, I’m not sure how much comfort one should take from that.
That’s Naughty Old Mr Car there, speaking to Netanyahu. Like, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you; I’m sure he was talked out of it later, as it is, obviously, a profoundly stupid idea, but he said it.
I remember waiting for Facebook to evaporate a decade ago too. Then I started hearing “Facebook” in the news every night and saw the logo on the back of Sugar packets at the cafe.
If anything - this is the biggest “no press is bad press” experiment of all time.
I hope they mean 200 "million" daily active users. Otherwise it would indeed be quite bleak lol
I'm not motivated to even respond for people asking for help, because they won't see it (for tweets with lots of replies).
Yeah, I realize that this will go away if I just pay the $8pm.
Can't wait to see what happens during the election year...!
I was never able to use Twitter over the main page, and I don't understand how people can with their hundreds of followers. Especially with the Ads mixed in between. Utterly useless for me.
FYI: Mastodon has a similar tool: https://mastodeck.com/ It works perfectly.
I would have to become a member of a club to be able to read what people write.
Even as a member of that club, I would have to pay to be able to write more than 280 characters.
And if I don't pay, my 280 character texts get burried.
If I don't pay, I cannot write messages to everybody like paying members can.
I hope somebody will make a Mastodon fork with a nice UI soon!
And half of them is Onlyfan sex workers…
I really wish the interesting accounts I still like to follow, which mostly are tech related, would go to Mastodon or Bluesky or anything else.
Clearly the least predictive user base. People have been "giving it two weeks" before it collapses for so long now.
Lowest quality prediction ever.
Its relevance has declined significantly in the last year.
Difficult to see how its relevance is declining when users are either declining very slowly or increasing, depending on which metric you look.
Predictable haters took a bite and there's a flood of self reassuring comments on how Mastodon is great.
Unsubstantiated claims abound.
I mean, it's OK to dislike Musk - there are one or two things he says which I don't like, but there also things I agree with him on; I'm a big fan of SpaceX, and I wouldn't ever purchase a Tesla (even if I could afford one), but I'm finding a lot of the bile being spewed here a bit of an eye raiser.
There's a guy on here who complains about "getting stuff from accounts they're not following" - and that's probably because they're on the "For you" setting rather than the "Following" setting; they're basing their dislike of X/Twitter on something they are in complete control of, in other words. I just have to shake my head at that one. And even if they were on "Following" - it's very likely one of the accounts they're following retweets a post from some account they might not necessarily be following.
There's a post on here accusing Musk of being anti-semitic; I've yet to see one anti-semitic post Musk has ever made.
In the meantime reddit just made it's content more accessible for unauthenticated users. I dislike spez as much as Musk (maybe a bit more even, I still have affection for 2012 Elon, before the drugs hit him too much, and I always disliked Spez), but i'm am able to recognize when an idea is good.
it used to be more important that users remained engaged, which in twitter meant people got to interact between themselves as number one priority.
but now, the main priority is to manipulate opinion more directly, so users interacting among themselves is no longer the first thing you're served.
I guess i'm trying to point out how twitter changed into subtly manipulating its users as the main thing; before they would only intervene directly to avoid witch hunts and things like that.
but now (with Musk) they're after money to be made by directing popular opinion, but they're noobs at this (FB/instagram are the real masters for now). This makes enough MORE money that advertisers become less relevant; and even user engagement suffers a little.
this gets to constitutional levels of danger when they intervene personal communication. But the internet has been doing this a lot nowadays; I have direct experience with reddit (shadow)blocking me from interacting with other users deep within nested comments in controversial threads; they're stiffing human-to-human conversation and pretending they don't do it; but this is just blocking... unleash the bots to really drive people's thoughts towards intended places... lest people do it on their own freewills
In general, once someone introduces a weird bespoke metric, I get very, _very_ sceptical.
- the « my feed » tab (or whatever it’s called) is filled with Elon’s tweets. Wtf? It’s not like he’s that interesting
- their new logo with the marble effect is cringe, every time I went to open it, I decided not to instead because it’s not attractive to me. The new name is cringe too, and no one seems willing to adopt it
- and finally the last step that made me uninstall it for good is Musk’s recent stances in politics (he’s clearly pro Russian and there’s no way I’ll believe the starlink debacle in Ukraine was not directly linked to Musk and Putin ; now he has a word to say on how European countries manage the migrant crisis). He’s an asshole and I don’t think I can trust anything linked to him, including Twitter, ever again
sorry, but it’s got all the branding of a tech startup whose employees discuss “growth hacking” with a straight face.
https://bsky.social is just a giant splash screen where it’s impossible to learn anything more about the platform before signing up. there’s an invite system, yet simultaneously it’s supposed to be decentralized? Google around and you’ll find blueskyweb.xyz with an FAQ page which talks up the decentralization angle massively. search “how would one deploy a Bluesky instance” for an hour and eventually learn that the stack is split into like four different conceptual layers with meaningless acronym names and the parts that actually matter are closed source.
so idk, until proven otherwise Bluesky is just a PR campaign promising everything to everyone and what they’ll actually deliver is a complete mystery. still, i wish they would bridge to Activity Pub so that i could peek inside without having to tie myself to it.
Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally, he wants revenge for his daughter coming out as trans - in his mind, the "woke" people on there "turned" her so [1]. Utter and complete horseshit, no one turns anyone into being or not being LGBT or is able to do so (except severe torture), the problem is he has more than enough money to burn on such ludicrous petty revenge fights and on top of that he's deeply in bed with the Saudis who have their own reasons to get rid of Twitter, most especially to prevent another Arab Spring.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/01/elon-musk-...
It's bizarre now that he's completely gone off the rails and no one to keep him in check, but it's no surprise given that he was the backstory behind kicking the collective arse of the established automotive industry including the battery pioneer Toyota and the established space travel industry.
The "david vs goliath" / "underdog" theme is pretty convincing on its own.
I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it; everything is explicable by leadership which is not only incompetent, but too incompetent to be told it’s incompetent and take advice from competent people.
No one needs to interpret a conspiracy into at least the Musk side of things. It's very clear by what he says (and backed by the utter drivel he posts and reXes all day):
> “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multi-planetary,” Mr Musk told Mr Isaacson.
The only angle that is a bit conspiratorial in nature is the Saudi involvement, but here it's hard to justify any other interpretation - either the Saudis ordered Musk around (which I find hard to believe), Musk conned them (even harder to believe), they underestimated Musk's intentions / the state of Twitter Inc (possible but if it were true it'd raise serious questions about their capacity/ability for due diligence) or they are silently agreeing with what is going on. I mean, they make a lot of money so they can afford to make mistakes, but many billions of dollars are still many billions of dollars.
This strongly indicated to me that Twitter is utterly failing in detecting CSAM. Musk’s decision to reinstate the account indicates that the reason theyre failing is that Musk doesn’t particularly care about sharing of child abuse material on his platform.
The blue check changes were annoying but this made using twitter feel straightforwardly unethical.
Yes, they threw her a curveball by having Yoel on before, but still, that's just painful.
Linda didn't say the number of users were declining, she said the opposite:
regarding comments from yoel: "one of the things he talked about was... 75% decline in content posted to X, that in fact is not true... and there's many days where there's more content posted to X and that is in spite of our aggressive efforts to fight spam and bots"
its around 6:40, source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ
which you notice after this comment the interviewer is just a tad bit upset to hear the good news
> When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation
no she didn't she was annoyed that yoel got to talk about it for 25 minutes and said that specifically while the interviewer pushed the conversation away from it
more sources citing the increase in usage
elon saying there's 3 billion views a day on long-form posts, which he says it equal to all newspapers on earth
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1704728644269064631
news regarding MONETIZABLE daily users sitting at 245 million
https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707754435861008713
while total daily users are over 500 million
https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707755712674160757
linda says there are even over 500 million posts per day
https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1707855477609029879
and to swing for the fences, to add to the decrease in bots, decrease in spam, and decrease in nazi content there's been a massive push on the pedophile front to remove child sexual exploitation on the platform
https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1669738881246273541
pre-elon there were disgusting amounts of pedophiles on twitter, and they basically went ignored for years, apparently the old moderation team like that content
free speech is here to stay and people like it
There is absolutely no evidence for this, and this kind of slander is the reason why Yoel Roth received death threats.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/22/elon-may-have-accidental...