60k people deactivated their X accounts on average each day in one week alone
londonherald.co.uk
londonherald.co.uk
At least 1 to 10 is my guess.
Which the site should be compelled to report to advertisers.
Obviously there is probably a decent amount of cherry picking of the stats to report.
Virtually any significant publishing platform has a press kit detailing circulation or equivalent numbers, which are in most cases publicly available, so far as I'm aware. I'm not finding a definitive statement as to whether or not this is required in the US, though most significant publications, and now online sites, provide similar data.
The Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) seems to be the principle source of circulation data in the US, per this Pew article (2023):
"Newspapers Fact Sheet"
<https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...>
That also notes however:
[T]hree of the highest-circulation daily papers in the U.S. – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post – have in recent years not fully reported their digital circulation to AAM.
And the easiest way to determine that is with a test campaign of just a few hundred dollars. Most platforms even give you "free credits" to do exactly that (in many businesses, a few hundred dollars can be a big barrier, because the employee doesn't want to put it on their personal credit card, yet getting the paperwork in place to go through the accounts department is a lot of work).
That means the platform-wide stats don't really matter. What matters is how cheaply the platform can get the right ads in front of the right eyeballs who will click through and buy a product.
How well the platform can attribute purchases is a big part of it too. Thats why people like youtube have "Which of these companies have you heard of? A. Amazon, B. Gucci, C. Flambaths" surveys - because that's their way to measure (and charge for!) brand adverts which don't lead to direct sales.
- The algorithm is extremely aggressive and antagonistic. Any signal (linger, view) on a post indicates you might want to see more of whatever it is. Usually it is posts that provoke the most reaction.
- Posts with links are automatically down-ranked.
- I've been seeing some of the most inexplicably offensive ads.
X has been a good way to find my news blindspots. Unfortunately it seems to be taking a hard right lean lately.
I read HN only because the content doesn't refresh too quickly and the comment threads are generally higher quality than tech posts on Reddit. Otherwise, substacks and email lists are doing it for me lately.
It'll make for some interesting stories a decade from now when we'll all reminisce about "remember how Musk fucked Twitter? Oh shit, is it still running?"
I'd be interested in seeing something about user IDs that scroll some minimum amount vs user IDs that just post.
My account got nuked because I changed my birthday date for jokes and it locked me out for being 'too young' when I signed up way back in 2007. I would have needed to provide photos of government ID to re-activate so I let it go.
I'd expect in general the number of people who leave a site but don't bother to actually go through the steps of deactivating the account to be quite a bit higher than the number that do deactivate.
But I'm betting this week was an outlier for some reason or another.
It's the only social network that feels unfiltered and not the typical politically correct crap.
I can understand left wing people leaving the platform and they account for half of the population so the numbers make sense.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=woke+author:jokethrowaway&type...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=abortion+author:jokethrowaway&...
You can call it running away but it's not out of fear, it's because the quality of discussion dropped to nothing. It didn't used to be that bad when a post broke containment. I've had great discussions on HN with people who disagree with me on very fundamental issues on political topics and I would describe it as polite and informative.
Where exactly is there "quality of discussion", if we include low quality responses in that rating, in any political space that isn't siloed? It doesn't exist today, and if the space is siloed then it also doesn't exist by definition.
It's okay to want to go where people agree with you more, even if it's because others aren't allowed in. But call it what it is, and note what it isn't.
Cool. Twitter has made this much more difficult, by (a) embracing a pay-for-attention model, where bluetick replies, which are rarely worth looking at, are artificially promoted and (b) by making mass-blocking far more difficult (through the death of the API). So, people are sensibly going to Bluesky, which provides a better product, with sensible, choosable reply prioritisation, and a first-party blocklist system.
Like a big part of what's going on here is that Twitter is a way worse product than it used to be, while on the other hand better competing products exist in a way that they did not before. It's pretty natural under those circumstances that people go from the bad product to the good product. This is, broadly, how most dead social networks have died, both those which actively made themselves worse (livejournal, Digg, Tumblr), and those which were merely overtaken (Friendster, Myspace, Slashdot).
Looking forward to monitoring the "death of twitter" and the victory of bluesky.
I'm sure that Bluesky was having a normal one!
Like, Twitter is clearly _worse_ with promotion of bluetick replies than it was without it; I don't think that's really controversial. That gives platforms which do not do that an advantage. Do I think Twitter is outright unusable in its current state? No, though it's getting there. But it's certainly way more _unpleasant_ to use than it used to be, and increasingly viable alternatives exist, so it's unclear to me why you'd expect people to bother using Twitter.
For every person that mirrors your sentiment, there is someone who doesn't. And then the same would hold for your opinion about the relative usability of other platforms.
It's unclear to me why you'd expect "people" (in quotes bc using that word to encompass everyone is strange in this context) to not use X and to be more approving of other platforms.
Last, its unlikely that any platform that primarily exists as a response to another platform will ever have a primary use as anything else. For example, Bluesky's future is likely only to be as a protest platform contra X. This is its identity that it will have difficulty shedding.
btw freedom of speech doesn't exist anywhere to begin with. Even in the self proclaimed "land of the free" you can't swear on public tv lmao, libel, slander, obscenity, fraud, &c. are all illegal. Meanwhile nobody talks about freedom of press even though the US ranks closer to Hungary than western europe, so much for freedom of speech...
Reminder that twitter is a bubble in the internet, which itself also is a bubble, and that real life exists out there.
"You cowards! Come back! We've got multiple drug resistant e coli on special this week!"