And if anything X/Twitter is gaining more relevance in normal peoples' lives, not less, since the acquisition.
Mastodon or whatever other federated alternative you're peddling are where the political extremists and pedos hang out and regular people want absolutely nothing to do with that.
Tech people of today are much more terminally-online than we were in 2004. We are not the cool kids this time around.
Objectively untrue, Twitter lost ~35m (out of 370m) active users since the Elon acquisition. I'm not sure how much of that was due to his policies as opposed to people just losing interest, but people are leaving twitter/X.
20m less people voted for Democrats this week and that's just eligible US voters. The people leaving Twitter are terminally-online fringe weirdos, from the perspective of your average person.
Just look around your own networks at the people who left: It's all hardline political people, infosec, trans activists, furries, etc. Those are not normies. I know it's hard to look in the mirror and say you're part of the echo chamber, but with high likelihood everyone posting on this board is exactly that.
None of us here are normcore.
To normal people, Musk himself is a "terminally-online fringe weirdo"… and in the same group as everyone here on "the orange site".
And yet, it was able to generate over $4.4B in revenue. It also remains one of the most popular social media platforms.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-collapses-84...
By these numbers, if it made $4.4B in revenue, that's the total since he bought it, not per year.
Its kind of funny to see the discussion here about X. First it was the platform has lost too many users. Doesn't matter, its still very popular. Celebs, politicians and companies still advertise on there. If the platform didn't generate revenue for these companies, nobody would be advertising on there, would they? No they wouldn't.
Then I pointed out it still generates billions in revenue. You said, "Well, it used to generate a lot more." Well, it also had massive overhead operating costs which Elon cut to the bone, so back before he bought it, the platform needed to generate a lot more because of the amount of people who did little or anything productive for the platform. If you take into account the reduction in human capital, and the overall reduction in other overhead costs, the profit margins are still very close to what they were pre-acquisition.
You, however, responded to a claim about number of users with a statement about revenue.
> If the platform didn't generate revenue for these companies, nobody would be advertising on there, would they? No they wouldn't.
Many did in fact stop. That is specifically why the revenue is down, that they stopped.
> Then I pointed out it still generates billions in revenue. You said, "Well, it used to generate a lot more."
I specifically denied that it generates billions in revenue, linking to a statement of 114 million in a quarter:
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-is-still-far-from-pr...
Your claim of "$4.4B in revenue" is what it did, past tense, in the year before Musk bought it — it's not the revenue it achieves now.
> If you take into account the reduction in human capital, and the overall reduction in other overhead costs, the profit margins are still very close to what they were pre-acquisition.
Not even close.
The purchase added $1.2 billion in annual costs for debt servicing, which is — all by itself even if it had zero servers, zero staff, zero other costs of any kind — 2.6x the total revenue.
The profit margin before the purchase was also a loss, -221m on a revenue of 5,077m in 2021.
So, even though I don't have a full financial report, I can say that at best it's now got a loss of at least -744m on a revenue of 456m. Probably worse because that's calculated on the assumption he's replaced all his staff with an LLM, has no bandwidth costs, no hosting costs, no rent, no electricity, and no lawsuits like the one in Brazil or all the previous staff who are suing for un-paid contractual obligations.
That's still the default way that most normie people share memes that I can see.
Posting is for blue-checkmark people and crazies.
And for all of the people that left Twitter, they aren't all suddenly active on federated alternatives. No, those got a fraction of those 35m users. Hundreds of thousands of users. Clearly not where the normal people want to hang out, as I said.
It is actually the terminally online techies who stayed under the guise of being "the resistance within" though I think most of them just can't bear to lose the inflated follower counts they have (the majority of which are probably just "P*SSY IN BIO" bots but whatever)
at this point it's the terminally online, or a bunch of non-agile holdouts like local governments or small businesses, non-profits, etc.
like my kids school district does announcements through FB and twitter, plus their website. it's far easier to get em via twitter. but that's mostly what its used for these days; anyone I care about communicating with has changed to Insta, gone to mastadon or lemmy, or just given up and walked away.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, I know plenty of non-techy people who hardly even know Twitter got renamed. Previously they would have stumbled on and read Twitter pages fairly often, but they never had an account so now they largely can't see any of it.
You are kidding yourself if you think that twitter has or is gaining relevance. It has nose dived in users and has dramatically lost revenue from advertisers.
Dont kid yourself.