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datpiff

> As much as I dislike Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, etc, they all are doing fine.

Hah, Twitter isn't exactly doing fine

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I was under the impression Twitter was doing well. What makes you say this?

Twitter's daily active user numbers have been in decline since the takeover.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...

It feels this way. I feel like I see the same 10 people who are talking about building and being a 10x developer but have 100k tweets and probably liked by the same 1000 accounts, 20% of them being bots.

Oh man the hustle culture bros! They tweet so much, aren't they supposed to be leveling up? Maybe its the new form of procrastination!

On Twitter, I never use to get spam DMs but now it is a daily occurrence. I never blocked anyone over 10 years but now I am blocking multiple people per day. I used to never see anti-semitic content, but now I run across it regularly (even though I don't follow similar accounts). I still enjoy interesting discussions on crypto and genAI tech/trends but that is probably not a broad enough audience to be sustainable for Twitter/X.

Advertisers leaving. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/elon-musk-twit...

Given the amount of counter examples in other comments - what makes you think Twitter is doing well?

They have lost most of their advertisers and serious users, because content has been driven into extreme corners. The platform is now full of bots, scammers and problematic opinions on the political spectrum. Latest I heard, they value of the company has gone down to less than half of what Elon bought it originally.

The only who are doing well on Twitter are crypto-scams, Nazis and trolls. But it seems Elon is now in those bubbles active, so maybe that was the intention all along?

So what Twitter competitor has everyone else gone to?

Maybe, finally, everyone just went outside.

I mean, I used it about 30 mins/day before, now it’s like 10 or less. Personally haven’t felt the need to find a Twitter-replacement, you just do other stuff more, I guess? It’s like dropping a hobby. You don’t replace it with an exact replica, it just wears off.

I don't know overall, but most of the people I know who stopped using Twitter didn't replace it with anything.

Discord, Patreon, Substack, etc

They were a startup, but now they are a medium sized business with website that burns cash.

does it still burn a lot of cash? I'm not super following, but since it's x 90% of employees were let go, no9

Perhaps savings from payroll were offset by loan repayments.

They let go of the advertisers too though. 8chan doesn't have a lot of employees either.

assuming the horrendously low quality ads and loss in traffic, yes

Are they still operating red? Got a source?

Works fine when I log on. At the beginning of the Musk era, everyone said the technology would fail. That hasn't been my experience. Plenty of tweets appear when I go to the site.

Now you might argue that the social networks are failing. There are definitely some people who I don't see any more.

But really, there are discussion and I can read them when I want.

It may be my bubble, but so many of my followed accounts have left, or stooped using it mostly, that my timeline is almost entirely US politics[1] and meme videos

[1] I am not even American

Now that discussions are ranked by pay, when you read a tweet thread it seems to be just all onlyfans promotion quasi bot accounts but paid blue check, even on machine learning threads and stuff.

> everyone said the technology would fail.

Most sites are able to operate without login. This is not case for the Twitter. It is operating still yes, but for now in austerity mode.

Not really my experience with social media. facebook, instagram, pintrest, ticktok, Linkedin all require login.

Edit: and HN, but it isn't driven by add revenue. Im not aware of any besides reddit that do not.

Posts show up, but there are far more bugs, and the general experience is slightly worse in lots of ways. Also, the overload of sycophants, trolls, and obvious bots has made it a lot noisier than it used to be.

By what measure?

Income, engagement, image?

What was their 2023 income?

vibes on HackerNews

Twitter is the best its ever been in terms of capability and features

Can't read anonymously anymore, which makes it more like facebook/instagram rather than a grassroots news site (which it used to be for a lot of people). It's a big loss I think.

Yeah, I used to occasionally click twit links when friends shared in chats or they were included in articles. Now I just don't bother because I either see the first of multiple posts in a "thread" or nothing at all. Much like when someone posts a link to Facebook or Instagram.

You don't even need SEO chum and AI generated "content" to understand why search engines suck so badly nowadays. The discussions that used to happen on (indexable) forums, blogs, and comments have largely moved behind pay- or login-walls.

The fact that so many people resort to appending "reddit" isn't so much a testament to the quality of reddit so much as it's a result of that being one of the few large, centralized platforms that could still be indexed.

> Much like when someone posts a link to Facebook or Instagram.

You get ugly amount of pop-ups there but at least the content will load.

For me Facebook is hit-or-miss. If the post is public (say, a venue posting about an event) I can typically read the main post, but can't click on anything. If I'm on mobile, it tries to redirect me to install an app. Usually harder to see much.

Instagram just shows me a Meta logo or a blank page. Not sure how much this is due to ad-blocking though, and not particularly inclined to disable it to find out. Mostly I just don't click and I ask the friend/whoever to summarize or send a screenshot if it's something I care about. For generic "hey look at this funny post" stuff I just skip it.

Sucks, because links from friends should be fun or useful. It's kinda nuts how many don't work unless you are logged into something snoopy/sketchy.

> best its ever been in terms of capability

I do not know about features, that may be true. But unfortunately Twitter seems to be in austerity mode. Unlike most sites, it is not working for wast majority of internet users.

It's doing better than ever IMHO. Much more information due to less censorship and government interference, and the community notes keep things in check with much less bias than the "fact checkers" ever did.

> less censorship and government interference

This is not true. Like when they censored Turkish opposition.

They also censored critics of Modhi's government in India.

You mean the community notes that have been disabled for the CEOs account? The account that needs community notes more than any other account on Twitter?

The delusions of Musk fanboys know no bounds.

> less censorship and government interference

> Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. The company has not refused a single request since Musk took ownership, according to self-reported data.

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

edit: Not to mention the period bans of Musk's critics.

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