X userbase 'grew 1.6%' since Musk's $44B takeover | Hacker News Reader

X userbase 'grew 1.6%' since Musk's $44B takeover

theregister.com

18 pointsrcarmo15 comments

Twitter has become an awful place (may or may not be due to Musk). But what are the alternatives?

I occasionally use Mastodon and like it very much as the signal to noise ratio is much better. But I also see most of SF remaining on twitter and people you ran into still identify themselves with their twitter handles.

Do we need an alternative? We operated fine before twitter, and I have never bothered to use it and I seem to operating just fine still.

Threads has been surprisingly good for me.

+1 for Threads - I'm shocked at how good the engagement is there, and how kind the community is (generally) too

Is it a good fit for people who dont use (or like) Facebook and Instagram?

I don't use either, and find Threads to be okay, though I prefer Mastodon.

Since it is facebook I'm going to guess no.

"What are the alternatives" is the wrong way to look at this. Morally, patronizing twitter with your time, attention, or money means supporting someone amplifying hate speech and conspiracies and trying to delegitimize democracy. It is clear that participating on twitter is morally untenable.

So Step 1 is to not use twitter, period. Step 2 can be looking for alternatives, sure, but Step 1 is to leave, no matter what.

Yeah the GP parent is sort of silly. I am not on twitter at all. Am I missing some information that is only on twitter? I dunno, maybe? But does it matter that I’m missing it? No, not at all. It’s no negative impact to your life to not be on twitter. Even the clowns who say things like “my career field requires me to be on twitter to learn latest x”. No it doesn’t. If it’s important, it’s also being discussed outside of twitter.

Depending on the exact demographics, Bluesky might be another alternative.

Federated is the way our species ought to organize social media. Glad to see ActivityPub and ATProto both growing. I have become dismayed at the changes since Elon's takeover and have zero interest in his "everything app"

It's the bots and NSFW accounts posting nudes I guess

My feed's been consistently good/crap (depending on the day), since way before the takeover, so I have not really noticed any big difference.

The only way I see it getting worse is generally nice and well intentioned people leaving because they don't like Musk, therefore making the space poorer.

Comment

(Let us ignore our constant battle of us performing our own but seemingly semi-autonomous blocking of all brand-new accounts created just for THE lone one "like" of our post ... or an AI-generated avatar come-hithering us by twanging a siren call toward our lonely heart.)

Elon bought it to buy a bully pulpit for his other endeavors and to ingratiate himself with right wing lawmakers. It was the ultimate rich guy mid-life crisis buy. You and I might spring for a Porsche or a Corvette, the wealthiest of the wealthy pay almost 50B for a mediocre social network and write it off basically as an advertising, soft power play.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com