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Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

Some parts of AOL are still around, so I suppose the ongoing Xitter exodus will slow down at some point. Things like local government outreach and Myspace-like démodé bands might take years.

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According to Elon, X is actually growing: https://x.com/search?q=all-time%20high%20(from%3A%40elonmusk...

It's extremely difficult to put any credibility behind any stats he puts forward. He seems to consistently mislead and outright lie.

In that same thread of posting of user stats he has a another graph where he claims he tripled traffic within 2-3 months of closing the purchase of X.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1775526635749417258

Advertising is down, users are down, bots are up, Fidelity (an investor in X) says the value of its investment is down ~80%, and we're supposed to believe he tripled users in 3 months? It's all completely faked.

The guy just consistently lies and misleads, and somehow there is a core set of people that no matter how many times he's been exposed continue to believe whatever he says.

Was that graph meant to be an April fool's joke or something? The timing's fairly close. I don't see how anyone could _possibly_ take a graph of that shape, showing "organic traffic", without any explanatory caveats about what happened to cause the abrupt rise, or indeed any explanation of the metric on the right axis, seriously.

Given that Elon is a notorious liar I would give zero credibility to his own self serving claims.

I've seen several third party estimates and they all show a significant (double digit percent) decline since Elon bought the platform, which seems a lot more realistic than his claim.

Where did you get the idea that he is a notorious liar?

The entire affair around having to buy twitter.

How was that a lie?

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...

He often promotes hate/lies with his “hmmm…. Interesting” retweets of what are often far right wing, sometimes outright racist, accounts, with straight up disinformation

I’ve had a lot of good looking ladies with thousands of follows and very few followers, take an interest in my extremely non-influencer like rambling. I call BS on his growth. Maybe there’s growth in pockets, like those who love his political commentary? There must surely be a lot of people who didn’t like the liberal tech bias of previous years. I’m close to just closing my account, but might just let it go dormant.

In the past year or so, nearly every day I receive at least one new follower from an obviously bot account despite me never posting or replying in over 9 years.

I spent some time blocking a ton of them a couple weeks ago and it seems to have dropped off. There should be an app to automate that. There probably is.

Interesting, I wonder who all the new users are? Most of the accounts that I have followed are defunct, slowed down, or mirrored on other social networks.

Bots.

There’s an enormous bloc of K-pop fans and crypto shills that make millions of tweets, retweets, etc., per day. Maybe even a million per hour.

Edit: And that’s just for the English language, maybe quadruple that for all languages added up.

Plus India/Pakistan twitter + sports twitter + African twitter users make at least another million per hour in English by my estimates. And at least 5x that when adding up every language.

Thai twitter users makes probably make at least another million per hour, though mostly in Thai. Same for Japanese twitter users.

Not sure what's behind that link, as it requires a login, but generally when he's said this he's been using weird bespoke metrics that no-one else does. If you're saying "according to [obscure bespoke KPI], everything is brilliant, actually, then everything is probably not brilliant; if it was, you'd just use a normal metric of goodness.

Technically speaking, even AOL kept growing into the late 2000s. It didn't stop mailing out CDs till 2006. IIRC its userbase didn't max out until well after "still being on AOL" had turned into a meme.

According to Wikipedia, AOL peaked around 2001-2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#/media/File:Aol_subscriber...

Looks like mid-2002. OK, early 2000s then.

Weirdly, having an aol.com address is a badge of honor among conservatives. At least, some article which I can't find now said so (and it seems to check out among people in my circles who actively use their AOL address).

I still have mine from when I was a teenager, although I don't pay for it and never will. As an email provider, the main difference between it and Gmail is that Gmail will never ask me to install security software of dubious value, whereas AOL webmail will do so frequently.

a man known for absolutely never making shit up at every opportunity. This time it’s the world famous metric “user seconds” that we all use at our own companies.

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