Six months ago NPR left Twitter; the effects have been negligible

"Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped."

Now it is about the time European public broadcasters and public administrations follow suit. (Ditto for all social media.)

It's true that for NPR the effects have been negligible (overall traffic dropped by 1%).

However, this is mostly a function of the fact that less than 2% of NPR's traffic came from Twitter in the first place. Even if it lost all of its traffic from Twitter, the effect could still have been described as "negligible".

But when you look at this in terms of percentages, NPR's traffic from Twitter dropped by over 50% after it deleted its account. So another publisher that's considering making this move should expect to see its Twitter-sourced traffic to drop by a similar percentage.

But the parade of calamities since:

- cutting back on moderation: who cares?

- unplugging servers: if the app still works who cares?

- reinstating banned accounts: this is arguably a good thing but who cares?

- replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges: wasn't verified in the first place so who cares?

- throttling access to news sites: who cares?

- blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising: arguably true but who cares?

I understand why NPR left but when I read the list of "calamities" there's not a single point there that affected me as an individual user. And I assume that's the case for vast majority of users. I understand people that don't use social media in general. But I never understood people that use and actually like twitter but quit because of these supposed "calamities" that didn't even really affect them in the first place.

To be fair, its probably true for most social media advertisement if you don't use clickbaity titles that much. I can see Facebook being more usefull (because the reach is superior, and the average lurker 10 to 20 year older), but i'm not sure its worth it.

Sadly, search engine advertising is probably the most effective (i'm aware, but still manage to click shitty ad links in google).

Traffic dropped 1% when NPR left Twitter, ok. But I'm curious how much incoming traffic is still from Twitter?

There's probably still tons of people posting & resharing NPR links, and these posts are probably more interesting for being social/organic references. If my friend links an article and says a couple blurbs, I'm way more likely to want to see what it is that excites them.

and 10 years ago or maybe more NPR got rid of comments on their articles. Their comments section was generally quite good and there were many regulars and a bit of sense of community, NPR often did not like the feedback and criticism the articles received

Doctorow is so tiresome.