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Comment by rpgbr | Hacker News Reader

OP here. I dropped an X/Twittter account in the end of 2022 with ~17k followers and… really, nothing changed. Since then, it’s safe to assume that things worsened there and everywhere.

Google is the only traffic referrer that still matters. See: https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-...

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I think things like this also depend on the site itself. A personal blog might fare different from a commercial website. I follow a few (niche) companies on Twitter who post new parts/products sometimes. I often click through to the link to see it. It is highly unlikely for me to visit their website out of the blue.

Pre and post Elon is a big difference for Twitter. Before I would post a tweet with links to my blog and would see an increase in both metrics and responses to it. Post Elon I don't think anyone even sees the tweet as I am not a paying twitter subscriber, and most people that would respond etc have left. And about 2 people see my Mastadon post.

I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that pretty much any semi-major company had a support presence on Twitter. Often just tweeting anything with the name of the company in it would get you a response from a support rep in a few minutes. It was one of the best ways to get in direct contact with support for many companies. The API limitations probably severely hampered this avenue of support for most companies, I imagine.

If you have 17k followers how many actual eyeballs see your posts? I guess it largely depends on how "stale" the account followers are (= how many are still active), but I have to guess it's below 1k? Maybe even below 100?

Then the math for conversion rate on link clicks after that, it seems like you might be talking about on the order of ten hits for 17k followers?

I had Wikileaks/Assange link to an article I wrote on Twitter. The clickthrough rate was like 500 readers or something. Quite underwelming.

WHen I left, it was ~1k. Subscribers are another increasingly meaningless metric — people left, people die, and their account remains there forever.

LinkedIn still matters quite a bit for commercial/professional stuff.

X still matters some. But anecdotally, X is far less relevant and used in my circles post-Musk. (And Mastodon hasn't replaced it for most people.) I think Musk was the impetus for a lot of people to dial down their social media use.

Anecdotally, a majority of people I used to see on Twitter I now see only in Discord.

honest question, does that say more about your circles or about X?

I don't know. Hence my qualification. I suspect the political angle of Twitter/X could be as active as ever. But there's been a huge dropoff in use across tech as far as I can see.

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