I've never used twitter but its ability to survive this X phase is fascinating me, and i want to understand how it has proven this resiliant.
I don't pay for anything; not really worth it to me as a casual user. I follow a few hundred accounts and maybe a couple dozen have announced their departure. I find new people to follow often before and after. Seems there's a bit more spam lately. But it's not something I'm super invested in so the changes don't bother me enough to justify spending the time to curate a new list of followers on a new platform that might die in a year or two itself. Who knows what X holds for the future but if I had to leave I wouldn't stress over it either.
The numerous competing platforms that want to replace it are all competing for users, which prevents a migration to a single alternative platform.
And that buys time for X to improve, which IMO it is. I may be wrong but I think long term it’s going to come out on top. At this point it’s getting tough to bet against Musk.
Twitter isn't dead yet, but it's no longer the universal town square, and the longer Musk controls it, the further away from that it will get.
Not to sound like a gatekeeper, but it feels Twitter is still appealing for the /r/startups crowd, "indiehackers" influencers and wannabes. The center of "real" tech talk has moved away from twitter.
I feel like this stated-as-fact assumption is actually the real question.
Sure there was a lot of loud fleeing in the months after the takeover, and motivated media outlets relish at reporting any figures that can be presented to suggest that this is a continuing trend.
Plenty of those who loudly fled have quietly come back, so many prominent voices are still there.
About a year ago I started a new account, keeping my follow list to about 100 people (mostly friends and people I like in tech/startups/sports/music/personal-growth) and avoided following anyone who is heavily politically partisan/vocal, and I find it to be fine.
I've seen countless accounts that have pinned post saying they quit the site but have about 10-20 posts/day, every day.
I have yet to find another social media site that brings all of that together in a nice, "streaming" kind of way. Reddit (where I'm subscribed to ~1k subreddits) is _almost_ as good but visiting Reddit is only really interesting once or twice a day because of the nature of their algorithm. TikTok is honestly pretty close to having a mix of art and programming, but the video format isn't as information dense as text.
Twitter keeps me coming back somehow.
The big change since he took over is that now I have to block a dozen or so people every day who are just on the opposite end of who I would ever want to interact with. Not just politically, but people actively seeking to be harmful to others in one way or another. Before that, I went 14 years of using Twitter daily and had only blocked a few spam accounts.
I mean, I get to read translated tweets from both Bibi and the Ayatollah, which is a depth of exposure I’d not see in MSM. I like that about X. I don’t think you get that kind of thing on Threads. You can choose who you follow and interact with on X, there’s no shortage of fascinating people and personalities, and ultimately you make it what you want. Some of the new features, like Community Notes, are appreciated.
All else being equal, I prefer less government/NGO/employee censorship collusion, so that’s a big change compared to old Twitter. I like to see contrarian viewpoints. It also differentiates the platform from Facebook and YouTube. I realize some people think differently, and I guess that’s what Threads is for. But Twitter/X seems like a more vibrant place to me than it did before.
There’s still no shortage of left-leaning shit posting and there’s probably more right-leaning shit posting than was allowed before. Tune out the noise. The idea that clearing the leftist and establishment filters has made the place an abandoned and barren hellscape is quite the opposite of reality, IME.
I have bsky accounts and plenty of invites, but it’s just a boring, joyless network full of the miserable people who left twitter sharing the same opinions back at each other, a feedback loop is how I’d describe it. I’m guessing that’s who it attracts, similar to how I assume places like Gab also attracted miserable people from the other side. I’d kinda describe that place as all the worst parts of 2020/21 twitter.
There’s also threads I guess, but it just seems like a network of celebrities and brands trying to seem hip.
As someone who has never used _any_ of these... that pretty much sums up my impression of them all. Just makes all the "but _my_ network of celebrities and brands is better!" all the more amusing.
Compared to what? Pebble (T2) [0] that tried (and failed) to challenge this alongside the string of other alternatives that have failed to over take Twitter / X's active user base.
Twitter's network effect is reason why these alternatives have mostly failed at being an alternative even after marketing as such.
Network effects really should not be under estimated.
(That being said, yes, I agree that Elon is doing everything he can to ruin that)
What's left are your friends, and for those I had a mixed strategy: help them set up accounts on Mastodon and still follow their twitter mirror. The ones that stayed on Mastodon, I can interact directly. The ones that dropped out, I follow their mirror and I ping them on im/email/phone when something they posted is a good hook for a conversation.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...
I think that was before it was revealed that Musk sabotaged a major US-backed military strike in Russia.
And I don't even consider myself a conservative. I just like my information uncensored.
Examples:
- Donald Trump.
- Milo Yiannopoulos.
- Paul Joseph Watson.
- Laura Loomer.
- Alex Jones.
On the other hand, pg, the creator of this site, was banned under the new management at Twitter. Ditto many other people whose only transgressions were saying words like “cis” or relaying publicly-available information.
Free speech indeed.
I mean, literal Nazis post hateful shit every day and don’t get banned. So the takeaway is that as long as you don’t anger the toddler-in-chief you’re good to go. Free speech!!
Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
These countries include China [2] and India [3].
[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
So you can't argue that X cares more about free speech than Twitter when they aren't willing to fight those laws through the judicial system. As always judge people on their actions not their words.
He censors. He just censors the things he doesn’t like. Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?
Taibbi is still on Twitter and is posting like every hour:
> Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?
Ask Trump.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
Twitter claimed it was biased towards rightwing politicians and news outlets, while refusing to release the data that it claimed would show this.
> The idea that Twitter was "censoring conservatives" was always a lie, because they tended to break the rules more often.
Were those rules neutral? Even more importantly, were the people determining whether those rules were broken or not?
No, this is a lie. The rules were applied in a very one-sided manner. A left-leaning poster would not even get a warning, while a right-leaning one would get insta-banned forever for the smallest infraction.
I have a friend who thinks X and Elon are great, and yet he misses the possibility of no platform at all to interfere in your communications.
Many Twitter accounts have been locked post Elon, so it's curious to me how anyone can consider it truly uncensored or free speech in any capacity.
As a centrist Australia, it was clearly leftist.
I much prefer it now, I can actually see post from both sides.