One Year into Musk, X Monthly Users Are Down 15% and Ad Revenue Has Slumped 54%
variety.com
variety.com
This timult has been good for people to internalize that it's a private, for-profit company, whose leadership can change, whose moral compass is up for grabs. Not the right venue for official communications from governments and institutions, let alone you or me...
Personally, I've found Mastadon to be a fantastic replacement. What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement? It definitely fits better with the public and open service that people wanted Twitter to be.
Nobody uses it. Talking to yourself was not a mainstream use-case for Twitter users.
I do miss quote-tweets as a mechanic; while they could certainly be abused, there were legitimate use cases. Mastodon plans to add them, but AIUI getting the appropriate changes made to ActivityPub to allow for consent-based quote-posting is a whole thing.
Who is nobody? Almost all of the people I used to follow and discuss the topics I cared about on Twitter are now all on Mastadon. I find that I'm having similar discussions at this point with almost all the same people I used to.
I’m not sure that there will ultimately be _one_ Twitter replacement; with the exception of Digg->Reddit, it’s actually rather unusual for that to happen when a social media site dies. Livejournalers-in-exile mostly didn’t go to Dreamwidth, say; they scattered to a bunch of rather dissimilar social networks.
Edit: the parent used to read "Americans and the world". Ergo, my comment.
The edit is as silly: "Americans and the rest of the world", why not say "the world" then?
The old board's moral compass was surely for sale, that is true. Never again.
> Because I post all the time
I don't? I have had lengths of years of just lurking. Maybe I'm a bit more active nowadays but am far from as active as the top 20% or so on the platform probably. Also my vote doesn't count more than yours. But from what I've seen at times I think some botters votes truly mean more than ours. I still put the original thought and work to every single one of my writings while knowing that. Truth and hard work will always prevail.
Elon is wealthy, but not cash rich. The revenue is absolutely a problem given his financing.
Just to share my experience I get mention spam pretty much every day (all with X symbol), or some scam using Elon's face for promoting itself
Here is a link to someone doing what you say should immediately attract ten bots:
https://x.com/xtlufa/status/1710110358088917405?s=46&t=mWO9f...
As you can see, zero bots have replied.
Unfortunately there are a lot of Elon haters who just make stuff up. I’m not saying you are one of those. But I will say that because of this phenomenon, when you make claims of this sort, if you don’t provide evidence you are likely to be asked for evidence.
Please also refer to the other reply link
Please also refer to the other reply link
https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1715823316991189078 (thread)
https://twitter.com/BenGolliver/status/1716940900260258199 (replies)
Investigating this took one simple search for “t-shirt bots.”
There should be thousands upon thousands of examples, a single search away, to choose from right?
Examples from query "need this shirt:"
https://twitter.com/kelsi_bree/status/1718103609832100137
https://twitter.com/pipikinkin/status/1718207087170498586
https://twitter.com/fxgotron69/status/1717662530242478481
Did you actually take a close look? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
I concede that may not have been the best example. Did you actually read my comment in full? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
Can you link the proof or analysis behind this claim?
Look at all of the non sequitur shirt tweets.
https://twitter.com/cosasdevida_13/with_replies
Same here- same domains even (viralstyle.com and vrlstyl.com)
https://twitter.com/humseila/with_replies
Same domains, links to a domain that has been taken down due to TOS violations (gystoore.shop)
https://twitter.com/Steven_Mr9/with_replies
Same spamming of links with vrlstyl.com domain, non-link tweets with fragmentary "bot speak."
Just skim these feeds and you can get a general feel.
I don’t see how you think this is wrong.
> You'd think they would have created a more bot-proof account signup process
So you’re concerned about the signup process at sign up time.
Sorry to edit but I wasn’t clear before and can’t reply.
I just don’t see these. I think they are buried deep in threads that aren’t surfaced. Only by searching specifically can you find them. That’s pretty much what Elon planned: freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
Also it seems reasonable to speculate that these particular bots are not prioritized to the extent that they are directly addressing specific requests on essentially (often) leaf nodes of conversations.
> As we all know bots versus humans is an eternal arms race, not much new here.
Calls into question claims that there have been substantiative gains made in that arms race, though- which is the point of this sub-thread in the first place!
But the number of interesting exchanges are decreasing.
The activity is low, the discussions are boring and the communities are homogeneous.
It's nothing like when twitter started.
The young us started the energy on twitter, and the old us moved out of it. This means the new services have people with the same opinion, less energy and busy life. It makes for a bland experience.
I'm pretty sure the current young crowd is on platforms we are not, innovating, creating their culture, and we are just not there to participate, or even witness it.
For example, I use it less and uninstalled the app
The community is in a slumber.
Although maybe I should thank him, because my time on Twitter has gone basically to zero, and my overall mood and productivity have gone up.
Gosh, the amount of fake news and hate speech is freaking insane. It's worse than being at the stadium.
Every tweet I read I had to Google or research for authenticity, until I found a few profiles more reliable - however this doesn't prevent fake news/hateful comments in the tweets.
Needless to say, I deleted my account when I realized that Elon has a political agenda. Bah. Next.
EDIT: I only feel like saying: poor newer generations. They will need a critical thinking like never before.
I think Musk drastic method could bring interesting changes to twitter.
But building wechat is not my idea of a better world.
Cashless societies are one step away from diving into dystopian nightmares. And a centralized chat and payment system is just way too much power in one spot for the gov not to abuse it.
But in fairness, one has to say that after building a $650B company (Tesla) and a $150B company (Space X), it is not necessarily a sign of business failure when one buys a $44B company they want to restructure and cut revenues in half in the process.
Like when you have built a 65 floor skyscraper and buy a 4 floor house as the base for your next project. You wouldn't probably be that scared to take off 2 of the floors if your plan is to reshape it into the next skyscraper.
Tesla is bigger than ALL of the major car manufacturers summed if you compare market cap (# shares x share price).
But let's look at reality today and not hyped up 10 year numbers:
Tesla's revenue and profit is a tiny fraction just Toyota alone. Toyota's revenue last year was $10 TRILLION, with a profit of $500 B and a market cap of $289 Billion. Tesla? 25B revenue, 2.7B profit, market cap? 649 Billion, twice the size of Toyota's despite 1/100th the revenue!! That's a full on LOL. And Tesla only became profitable a few years ago after 10 years without musk and 10 years with musk (roughly, and putting aside the first year's profit due to BitCoin investments).
Source data:
[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TM:NYSE
[2] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ
Now, Musk revealed in the recent earnings call that their margins are around 7%.
The real numbers paint a far dimmer picture than those of Big Casino.
I'm really interested to see what the second decade of Musk Tesla looks like. Will people buy used Teslas? Will batteries last 2x as expected? Will people second-life their car batteries as home backup? Will it really cost 2/3rds the price of a Tesla for new batteries? I have a feeling Tesla will remain a small niche brand (it describes itself as a carbon offset company), and instead focus on charging stations which seems far more profitable.
Familiar with the old cliche about who made money during the gold rush of 1800's California? The people making pickaxes and shovels. Infrastructure with endless rental fees is the way to go IMHO. Also, I'm a terrible investor. :)
You're mixing JPY and USD. The numbers you give for Toyota need to be divided by 150 JPY/USD. So $66B revenue with $3B profit.
“I am brilliant and will succeed at anything” runs into a wall when your acumen in a specific domain and a string of luck hits the wall.
Twitter was not an engineering problem to be solved when purchased, for example. Which makes sense! It was a social network, and driven by the whims of the system of humans using it. Does Elon know people? Enough to sell Teslas, but not enough to protect or grow the value of a social network.
How much time he "gets" is probably between him and his creditors.
Inevitably some guy will come around organizing some Twitter boycott. Or maybe some Elon fanboy meme. I'm going to be honest with you.
Normal people don't do that. Only people who post online obsessively making low quality predictions and then complaining about a loneliness epidemic and stuff like that.
If this forum has no predictive powers and low knowledge of the world, you need not worry about comments here, as they have no relevance towards the outcome. Right?
Certainly though, enjoy when your own predictions are correct.
The highest and best use for a computer network
To push Russian propaganda, to threaten to blackmail advertisers by removing their verified status if they don't spend more money, to utterly destroy tens of billions of dollars in valuation in mere months.
Not to mention the renaming of a company that had achieved a household name status that many marketers could only dream of, etc.
I'm sure glad someone had to step in and make all these tough decisions.
He didn’t buy the scraps, he bought a whole ass company. Scrapping it happened afterward.
If he were smart he would’ve kept the twitter name going and launched the X “everything platform” alongside using the same accounts like Instagram/Threads. But maybe even put it inside the current twitter app, since they still don’t have any new features to make a separate “everything” app out of. Things disconnected from “tweets” like direct messaging could’ve been immediately reshuffled into being X features.
Repurposing the blue checkmark with preferential tweet promotion could’ve been launched as paid bonus for “X Pro” or something, maybe causing less kerfuffle about charging for twitter.
But that’s just my opinion as someone who bailed on social networks years ago, who knows if it would’ve gone better.
That's not free speech.
That's just censoring other things.
People keep saying he is some bastion of free speech, when talking about a guy who literally fires people who contradict him, bans people he dislikes, and downright disconnects his platform from the rest of the online discourse.
It works even better now. And they’ve added lots of features. Not a fan of the new branding, but I prefer free speech and community notes over opacity of previous Twitter admin.
Tell me more about threads and mastodon. Next year; you’re still going to be talking about twitter.
That’s fine. But please stop pretending it’s not political and these are all attacks on facts and merit.
Twitter is still not my thing because I dislike the format which I see as a textual forerunner of the likes of TikTok but it got more palatable after Musk brought in the kitchen sink and started throwing out the old censorious guard.
- Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a decrease 90% reduction in lines of code from 700K to 70K, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint, and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request.
Among a ton of other improvements. Obviously the company is now more tech-focused. And shedding its old skin (not users the way people are saying, 15% goes literally inside random year-to-year deviation). X/Twitter has proven that it can endure Freedom.
One thing I'm sure is that the sale has shifted us off one very bad timeline.
Edit: I made a pretty unbiased and rational comment. But I can see how many people are biased and despise musk for some reason or the other. I do not have any bias or baked interest. I’m just stating facts as I see them
Tesla and SpaceX are successes because of government programs and legitimately competent leadership outside of Musk. Twitter has neither of those things.
Indeed. A year ago, Twitter / X was predicted to completely collapse 6 months after Elon bought the company followed by bankruptcy afterwards.
We have given the predictions enough time to manifest and they haven't. Had the layoff not happened, the company would already be bankrupt much earlier.
Articles like this [0] did not age well.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
[1] https://www.engadget.com/twitter-puts-strict-cap-on-how-many...
This has been a year full of engineering excellence that sometimes can go unnoticed. Besides all the visible changes you see on our app, here are some of the most important improvements we have made under the hood.
- Consolidated the tech stacks for For you, Following, Search, Profiles, Lists, Communities and Explore around a singular product framework.
- Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a decrease 90% reduction in lines of code from 700K to 70K, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint, and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request.
- Unified the For you and video personalization and ranking models, which significantly improved video recommendation quality.
- Refactored the API middleware layer of our tech stack and in doing so simplified the architecture by removing more than 100K lines of code and thousands of unused internal endpoints and eliminating unadopted client services.
- Reduced post metadata sourcing latency by 50%, and global API timeout errors by 90%.
- Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate +37% greater than 2022. On average, we prevent more than 1M bots signup attacks each day and we’ve reduced DM spam by 95%.
- Shutdown the Sacramento data center and re-provisioned the 5,200 racks and 148,000 servers, which generated more than $100M in annual savings. In total, we freed up 48 MW of capacity and tore down 60k lbs. of network ladder rack before re-provisioning it to other data centers.
- Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%. Among the changes we made was a shift of all media/blob artifacts out of the cloud, which reduced our overall cloud data storage size by 60%, and separately, we succeeded in reducing cloud data processing costs by 75%.
- Built on-prem GPU Supercompute clusters and designed, developed, and delivered 43.2Tbps of new network fabric architecture to support the clusters.
- Scaled network backbone capacity and redundancy, which resulted in $13.9M/year in savings.
- Started automated peak traffic failover tests to validate the scalability and availability of the entire platform continuously.
So here we are 1 year later, hundreds of millions of users still continuing to use the platform regardless of all of that.
As such, I have flagged this article and will flag any articles that paint Elon in a bad light. Go have your fun with someone else who isn’t saving humanity. Once you all learn to behave yourselves I will remove the flag.