Elon Musk's X is losing users in the U.S., UK, and EU. X's own data proves it | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's X is losing users in the U.S., UK, and EU. X's own data proves it

mashable.com

16 pointsdoener7 comments

In the last few weeks I’ve noticed there’s been an influx of engineers moving from X/Twitter to BlueSky. If you’re looking for early Twitter vibes, https://bsky.app is where it’s at.

I don’t have accounts on most social media. I don’t know if I get counted as a DAU but Reddit and X both became more aggressive towards converting folks to account holders. That’s pushed me away from both of them.

reddit has been degrading the site for everyone, logged in or not, but I don't think the goal is converting folks to account holders.

I use reddit from two computers, one logged in, the other not, and haven't noticed any difference except the obvious features that require login (commenting, voting, subscribing).

Ok, according to "X's own data", MAU dropped from 112 million to 106 million in the EU.

That 6% drop doesn't prove that SimilarWeb was right when they claimed a 20% drop in the US and a 33% drop in the UK.

I think the real damage to X is the loss of important posters. X is no longer the place to find status reports from companies. It seems to me that nobody wants to be associated with the filth being promoted. I sure don’t want nazis responding to non-political posts I’m in.

let's face it, what does X have that can't/hasn't already, very easily be replicated elsewhere?

in the past I might have said "legions of effective moderators. You can't just flick a switch and implement that on a Twitter clone".... but now?

The answer is "other users". The value of a social media rises with the square of the number of users. If none of your friends are on it, you probably won't join.

The technology is easily replicated, so there are lots of alternatives. But no one alternative is overwhelmingly obvious, so the number of users on each is small. Even if half of Twitter's users fled, the sum of other sites' values will still be much smaller than the remaining half.

It may be that a Bluesky or Threads or some such will eventually reach a threshold -- especially if they can be inter-connected and benefit from the increased size. But that only happens of X is really unpleasant -- which apparently, it is.

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