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Comment by Veuxdo | Hacker News Reader

The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.

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> People are leaving in droves

I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?

> People are leaving in droves

I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).

> People are leaving in droves

I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place.

I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.

The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.

Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there.

I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.

"Follow the money". And the money follows the users.

Normally, yes. But the only thing brands love more than money is good brand assossiation. And that's where Musk comes in.

Users can ignore that. Brands can't.

>People are leaving in droves

I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.

Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism.

I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.

Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market.

You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.

Many censored people are coming back to Twitter/X

Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky.

The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception.

I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service! https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco... Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see.

It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online.

I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there

> Twitter/X seems to have good engagement

Perhaps. But not for the audiences that matter to advertisers.

Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives,

I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM

Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!

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