Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
Now that Musk has recently changed the way unfurls work, I would imagine that definitely affected their traffic.
Doctorow has had a chip on his shoulder about Musk for a while now and I would be happy to go out on a limb predicting that any theories he has about Twitter's demise won't age well. The reason Twitter works is because of network effects, and those network effects are a function of Metcalfe's Law, not the presence or absence of a single account on the platform. Being part of the web, Twitter's network effects are intertwined with the web and their social graph. That's about it. The way to know if Twitter is going down in flames is the degree to which Musk breaks the network effects of the web, or if the exodus from the platform turns into some kind of positive feedback loop. Musk seems much more willing to mess with the former than the latter. (Much of the recent changes are about increasing users and time on site)
So it might not have made much of an impact for NPR (though no publisher wants to lose 1% of traffic), but for a publisher with more traffic coming from Twitter shouldn't nuke their account, thinking that it won't matter for them either.
Entire niche and hobbyist communities I'm in have left Twitter almost entirely. Those that still do post content there have seen a huge drop in interaction.
Musk has made it a platform with friction, and those with less friction are stepping in.
I can believe that certain people are bought-in on Twitter for the long-haul. But social networks are dynamic, and after a while we're going to see the effects of a worse client, less dependable web app and weaker hosting architecture. Even if Elon isn't a destructive force internally (ha ha), the changes have already soured it for a lot of people. Twitter's existence is based on a delicate precipice of advertising and free content. You can't change the deal and expect everyone to be on board going forward.
Imagine if Hacker News made the same changes, do you think it's audience would stick around? I certainly wouldn't. Maybe I'm wrong though, I don't really see the inside story.
Both instances feel less like an olive branch and more like a last-ditch effort to retain the important users. Instead of listening to user concerns or fixing the apps, they've decided to incentivize popular users to stay active. It's not a draw for newcomers, who'd pay $8 a month for every $0.20 they earn. It's not a draw to developers, who now pay out the ass to access their platform. It's a "you're locked in here with me!" play that doesn't bode well for the treatment of users.
Or at least I'd like to think so. Realistically, I don't care either way. Even if Mastodon empties out completely I'm not going back.
I’m not exactly sure what Twitter / X is these days, but my Twitter isn’t Normies and Mainstream Convos :-)
Everyone I knew IRL has left Twitter.
I am not sure if it is just changes to the stream shown to me or something else.
This feels the same like Tiktok. In 2020 it felt like a platform of creators.
Today it feels optimized for advertisers.
I miss that bit, I dont miss most of twitter though.
That's actually disturbing, since Twitter users are a unique demographic all by themselves. Twitter has never adequately represented the wider spectrum of viewpoints (and, from everything I hear, is worse at it now than ever before).
I honestly don't remember a single case when something big happens in the world today, I go to the "old" news site the same day and that event is not reported.
Maybe some obscure regional politic events are reported with delay (even that is debatable), but why would you want some urgent news about obscure regional stuff? And how would a person understand that it is a real event and not a fake posted on twitter for some outrage?
You could drill down into a bunch of specific areas and have a similar effect all over, but trying to do that in too many places leads to a drinking the firehose feeling.
It still is isn't it?
https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/x-twitter-gaza-israel-m...
If the actual journalists paid for the blue checkmark, that'd solve the issue wouldn't it?
Twitter prior to Musk was a sinking ship (cancel culture exaggerated the problem). Asking people to pay is one of the attempts to solve that problem. If a journalist is unwilling to pay, they're going to be deprioritized and can't really complain about it. But Twitter has been very open and transparent about the need to reduce bots by paying for the checkmark.
Actual journalists are often blue ticks and intentionally misleading so this is as pot/kettle/black situation if there ever was one.
It's not quite the same as breaking news, but it's illustrative that a lot of the tech conferences I follow no longer have much if any of a Twitter back-channel. It's just not cool to hang out there any more, at least for some interest groups.
Edit: in the past, the rampant misinformation and botnet voting rings were limited to "Trending Hashtags". Now bad actors and edgelords have direct access to my (and everyone else's) default view ("For you")
edited to add: the problem now is that it's often genuinely fake news on Twitter and you have to separate the wheat from increasingly large piles of chaff. You have to be extremely diligent about curating your account to do that.
I thought Threads was not supposed to be about news [1], and at any rate its traffic is dropping.
CNN is probably one of the first-movers in the news space, but surely it's behind Twitter in terms of timeliness.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...
For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were.
This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities.
Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180...
Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.
Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform?
I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days.
I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
I guess words don’t have to mean things any more.
when Musk implemented cheap paid verification subscriptions, the first thing most of the formerly-exclusively-verified journalist-type users (that I follow, at least) did was post links to their profiles on new Twitter-clone platforms they were moving to, which, if investigated, revealed that they once again had a special "Verified" or "Verified Journalist" tag on their profiles there as well.
surely you're not implying that my analysis has zero merit and that nobody who was verified on Twitter before paid verification subscriptions were implemented was ever in it for the self-important narcissism?
If someone got verified for narcissistic reasons it didn't particularly affect me: there were plenty of verified accounts that I paid no attention to at all.
I cared about the verified accounts where the verified user or organization was noteworthy and interesting to me.
And so, overall, taking away blue checkmarks from professionals and giving them to spammers has been a net loss for Twitter, at least for those of us who appreciate good information.
It's not verification anymore though, is it? It's just an icon that you get when you pay a monthly fee. AFAIK there is no verification step.
Perfection of any kind does not exist in the physical world, so any test against perfection will fail - it's simply a matter of phrasing to choose what you want to identify as failing.
The test isn't whether All or Every such-and-such meets some test, it's the current state (do many or most meet the test?) and the direction (are more or fewer meeting the test?) that matters.
Once that went away, those people started to leave, and Twitter descended into a morass of nonsense, as they were replaced by people who never did anything notable in their lives but were jealous of the attention given to those who had.
why was this? what authoritative power over verifiable notability did Twitter once have, such that this could possibly be the case for anyone who thinks about it for longer than two seconds, or encounters their first instance of, "ok but why was this person verified while this other person isn't?"
Malik Obama was verified on Twitter long, long before Musk took it over, and he regularly made (and still makes) all sorts of outlandish claims about his half-brother—are these all to be considered implicitly true, on account of his profile having been Pre-Musk Verified?
Even if Twitter got it wrong with blue checks sometimes, by and large, the old approach led to a platform that was a vastly more reliable source of information than the cesspool we have today.
What it did allow, was quickly scanning through a sea of replies to find the ones that might come from someone with more authority or experience on a topic than SassySam123123, and then feeling confident that the post that purported to be from the Foreign Minister actually was. This was of course unpopular with SassySam123123.
It was a signal that you could use as part of your own evaluation of what was worth paying attention to.
It had nothing to do with whether or not something was true.
The fact that some said some wild thing - true or not - is still an interesting piece of information, when the verification process demonstrates that it really IS that person saying that thing.
Twitter faced backlash in November 2017 when it verified the account of Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. The backlash forced Twitter to pause its verification program.[9] Several days later, Twitter removed Spencer and Kessler's verification statuses.[10] Likewise, Twitter had removed verification from Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its policies in January, signaling Twitter verification implied endorsement.
Either you are saying that in fact not having prominent neo-Nazis' content tagged as coming from notable sources was a meaningful problem, or you are making a slippery-slope argument with no clear indication of why we were headed to a problematic part of the slope. In either case it doesn't seem persuasive.
Leftists call anyone to the right of themselves a Nazi so your claims about specific individuals are uninteresting.
There's this swath of people who want to be Notable and just aren't, and they think that painting a checkmark on themselves will fix it.
I completely agree with you.
>Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable.
I completely disagree with you.
i think the mess of blue checks now shows that this issue absolutely isn’t limited to “journalists and media personalities”
social media as a whole has shown us first hand the lengths people will go to in order to seek impressions. it’s pretty common to see regular people lie, manipulate, twist, etc… to get those impressions.
in the past, We devised something called journalistic ethics which he expected those with a platform to put a good faith effort to follow those guidelines. this allowed us to make a distinction between signal and noise.
of course this wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is.
either way, we’ve seen pretty clearly now for quite a while that it isn’t some nefarious plot by former “narcissistic” journalists or whatever—people on every site do this, and people actually pay money for the checks on twitter now lol.
2) Using embeds in their articles let them launder copyright via twitter randos to let them avoid paying royalties to license images and videos from the original sources.
That said, my experience is in local municipal stuff and a lot of this is no longer true because of musk shit.
You basically said it is to feel important (your branding, whatever) amongst your peers.
The general public doesn't care, you do though (what the person you're replying to said, and basically what you just reiterated). As a member of the general public that doesn't use twitter (I use nitter to view twitter, and I won't call it X), I feel that it is a massive echo chamber amplified by bots and fake engagement numbers.
You're twisting every aspect of my post to the point of satire. I never said anything about wanting to "feel important" amongst peers and your interpretation is.. strained, at best. I'm literally just talking about career growth here.
Maybe take a deep breath and a break.
There was a period between 2010-2020 when Twitter was truly the main convergence of entertainment, media, political and financial commentators. It was the place to be seen.
It doesn't seem to really exist anymore. These different verticals have been scattered all throughout the internet. It is an increasingly small number of people who simply hang around there for the little dopamine hit they get when they see the notification.
Most political and corporate communications strategies have diversified away from Twitter because it is a sinking ship. This started before Elon took the helm, but he has certainly accelerated its demise. Increasingly, it is a reputational risk to even be on the platform anymore.
Ad Revenue is down for sure.
The stock certainly has performed far worse before the acquisition - especially relative to others.
If it's like a liked-in account for developers, it explains very clearly why journalists use it so much. But this is not the use people claim to get from the platform. On that account, linked-in is way more honest.
Side note: it's a very strange thing to read a comment like this from someone who puts their multiple websites in their profile not unlike a resume.
Still, we use github to talk to each other. Not to the public. When news companies talk about posting things on twitter, they always talk about reaching the public, and when journalists quote it, they use it as if it came from the general public.
There's nothing wrong with journalists talking with each other. What's unsettling is that you almost unanimously claim you are using the platform in a completely different way. (And apparently honestly believe that claim.)
"What's unsettling is that you almost unanimously claim you are using the platform in a completely different way. (And apparently honestly believe that claim.)"
I have zero idea what you're referring to here. What is "a completely different way" and why do I apparently honestly believe that?
Also, in the context of the GP “talking to each other” was clearly intended to mean that journalists using Twitter had no point. He’s explained why that isn’t the case.
Journalists on Twitter is totally OK as a community that is Tweeting at each other for the benefit of their own networking and community.
That’s not a bad thing :-)
I wonder how many unique (non-bot) users actually post on Twitter each month. I reckon that number versus MAU is going to be very asymmetric.
Assuming they follow the standard social media rule, only about 40-60M of those people are Tweeting in a month, which is still a lot. And my guess is a lot of those are bot tweets.
That's like saying "turns out, that lego enthusiasts was just making little buildings for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really care"
Twitter started with celebrities and journalists but today you can always find an independent voice or some niche group that has better info, smarter analysis, and hotter takes, all while not being boring. Everything a modern journalist is constitutionally incapable of. It's like the blogosphere of a decade ago.
Muting these outlets makes the platform better for its users.
Why do people still believe this?
I read/watched a lot about the behind-the-scene stories of these media organizations, and I have faith in their methodology in verifying sources and checking all the details. They have hiccups, sometimes really bad ones, sure, but that doesn't mean alternatives sources are better.
Is it some sort of competition? Honestly, you should really stop reading all of it. It's very manipulative. Stick to first hand accounts if you must.
I realize that would render some of the threads about Cory and his feelings about Elon off-topic, but the headline here is about NPR, and Cory's post is not the original (and is mostly not about NPR).
> 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.
So it had almost no effect because it was driving a minuscule amount of traffic in the first place. Although I suspect that 2% represents the nadir, and earlier changes to Twitter drove the number down to that.
But overall this topic is mostly just two people using a single line in a memo (a memo not confirmed by NPR but I suspect it’s true and exists) to go on at tiresome length about things they wanted an excuse to complain about. And Cory desperately needs an editor, good lord. I even agree with most of his points but that is a screed in need of a point besides “I’m angry about a lot of things”.
So does Tesla. Try getting your Tesla fixed. All the Tesla repair shops suck. All of them.
Right...
I have never understood this kind of "Yay! We're kicking their ass! Our team is winning! We're winning! Look at them suck!" kind of thing. Perhaps it's because the rest of society goes to a sports game and yells that kind of thing. But people who have some animosity towards Elon Musk or Twitter have been proclaiming its death for a year now. "I give it two weeks" and so on.
What value does anyone gain from this kind of experience? Just the repetition of one's imminent victory? It's fun for a while but why immerse oneself in this stuff. Cheapens the mind.
So, maybe it's not just me that my current handle is getting no traction.
This says it's down 6% just by June: https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1668274511383240704
https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/
That says:
> 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.
Again, I'm not taking sides here between "XDaily" and an internal NPR memo. This is just to give you the answer to your question.
So same as the last 20 years, then?
Some of the Pro-Palestinian voices (I am not of this viewpoint) I could not have imagined on Twitter before Elon because the Pro-Israeli view (I am not of this viewpoint) is the mainstream and close to the establishment view.
Though I take neither side, I think having more voices present and less government censorship and a multitude of voices, including non-US voices, is better for understanding.
But sure, go a bit further and set your hosts file so common facebook domains to resolve to localhost, use a JS protection extension, etc. I always have. It seems a sensible mitigation for these types without anything else being required. And it's completely non-violent and non-coercive. Something you as an individual can just do without having to have 300 million other people required to do it.
I don't understand the reason for staying on Twitter? Just seems really petty... it's just a social media channel among many.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
NPR decided the value prop wasn't worth the fee. This article seems to indicate they made the right call, from a dollars/engagement ratio.
Here is NPR's original response
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
Total spend by the CFB is a whole $1.40/yr per person, and the lion's share of that goes to PBS, not NPR.
If the 1% number NPR touts was real, they should advocate for the disbandment of CPB so their independence would be undisputed, but they live on that money so they don't.
Does that make Tesla a government funded company? Should Tesla be given state-sponsored flags on Twitter?
The reason car companies don't get the "state sponsored media" flag isn't that they're not state sponsored, it's that they're not media organizations.
"Do we need support for gas stations? We don't," Musk said. "There's no need for support for a charging network. I would delete it. Delete."
They're not owned by GE anymore though. They're owned by Comcast, which... maybe it should still get the tag.
Calling (2) "state-funded" when the signal was clearly intended to indicate (1) is disingenuous and eliminates the value of the signal.
What's the point? Nobody thinks that the Musk fans attacking NPR are arguing in good faith. No matter what NPR does they will keep finding reasons to attack it, unless Elon says otherwise. Intellectual consistency is about last way to describe Musk's flailing changes over at twitter, yet his diehard fans always defend them.
The US does have a state media news org. It's called Voice of America. They have a youtube channel.
(Spoiler: government advertising pays significantly more of the budget of a great many commercial and "independent" radio stations)
Words need to matter. You could call this Federally funded media - but he didn't .. And like others have said funny he didn't label Tesla or Space X state sponsored car company. They are (and should be imo) This was just playing politics.
And yeah sure, they weren't directly funded but that's semantics. The stations, which constitute NPR are state funded. It's such a weird position to deny something like this, it just exposes your biases (aka, the label was never meant to be factual but mostly to be a smear)
No. As the article you linked to notes, the problem is that Musk's label was designed to suggest that NPR is state-controlled media rather than the independent non-profit that they are.
And of course, Musk doesn't apply the label to his companies, which have received billions in government funding and support.
It didn't help that Musk encouraged his Muskovites to attack NPR while this played out.
All of this is a distraction from the point of the story, which is that being on X is virtually worthless for brands.
which of his government-funded companies are media companies such that a "State-Sponsored Media" label would be warranted?
This is assuming that the benefit is from instantaneous rather than long-term conversions, which is more likely to not be the case for something like a media outlet.
How you get users from something like Twitter is when other people retweet your stuff so it gets discovered by people who aren't already familiar with you. For established outlets that happens regardless of whether you have an official account. Maybe it happens less because Twitter users might have followed the official account and then seen and retweeted more stuff. But even there what you're really after is discovery to gain more long-term listeners, which isn't going to show up as a short-term effect anyway.
Assuming that Musk/Twitter aren't surreptitiously limiting the reach of media outlets he doesn't like, like they did with the NYT[1]. Ironic, how Musk accused Publicly listed Twitter of "shadow banning" during the manufacturer "Twitter files" fiasco. Long term conversions isn't something media outlets can bank on on Twitter.
1. https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-appears-throttle-york-times-0...
The real test is if Musk will get it to stop doing that. How long does that take in a large bureaucracy full of legacy code and potentially hostile employees? Plausibly longer than he's controlled the company.
> Long term conversions isn't something media outlets can bank on on Twitter.
Long-term conversions don't need the platform to like you tomorrow. That's what makes them long-term. Once they know you exist they keep coming back to your own service.
Isn't that precisely what I pointed out in my comment?
> In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
The reason NPR didn't like that label is that it was applied to them in a way that directly compared them to those propaganda outlets.
Also from that story:
> Twitter's own guidelines previously said, "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
It looks like Twitter re-instated that policy - that text now appears on this page: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia...
Wow, I thought I had clicked through to the wrong article because there are so many paragraphs that are seemingly unrelated to the headline. Also, Cory seems to have fudged the facts a bit, since NPR's move didn't have "no effect" as he claimed. It had a "negligible" impact, according to NiemanReports. [1]
Is this nitpicking? Yes. But when you choose a headline that misrepresents the facts (even those you present in your article, many paragraphs down), then it's appropriate.
NiemanReports' article also has some enlightening data regarding the magnitude of the impact.
> 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
So if less than 2% of the total traffic came from Twitter previously, and the total traffic has since dropped by 1%, that means that by removing their account they lost more than half of their Twitter-sourced traffic.
For a publisher like NPR, which had minimal Twitter-sourced traffic in the first place, that isn't too big a deal. But it means that other publishers shouldn't hastily delete their Twitter accounts, thinking that their traffic won't drop materially. If NPR's experience is representative, a publisher should expect to lose just over half of their Twitter-sourced traffic if they delete their account.