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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.

The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.

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I don’t think we can say for sure whether it’s doing worse businesswise since the numbers aren’t public. But consider e.g. https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/

“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”

Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.

you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves

Left where?

twitter

The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the marketing value.

After NPR left twitter they saw a 1% drop in traffic from socials. It is not a useful platform.

Source: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/

Well, the HitlerGrok thing happened yesterday...

I ask this genuinely and without any intent to cause offense: given your name, are you a bit?

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