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Comment by icepush | Hacker News Reader

I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.

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Do you have numbers to back that statement up? I don't necessarily doubt it, but I haven't seen anything to support it.

Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.

Twitter is a shadow of what it once was. The design of the site has shifted very very hard in favour of being an algorithmic content soup rather than a social network in the traditional sense. This has juiced the engagement numbers but there's a lot less meaning to them now. (I can say all this because I am a bitter holdout who still tries to use the site to have conversations with people and form personal connections. Tragically it still offers something that Bluesky and the Fediverse do not, even if that thing is slowly but surely being smothered out.)

I'd say about a third of software engineers whose blogs I stumble upon and end up liking aren't active on twitter. Their accounts typically have nothing posted for 3-4 years, but they're active on bluesky or mastodon.

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

There was nothing wrong with twitter, it was a social fad to performatively leave.

Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.

X’s revenue is down by 2/3 from the acquisition peak. That’s all you need to know about whether the decline was real or not.

Both are not comparable as the stickiness dynamics are completely different.

On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.

On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.

Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.

That was a political decision, this is an operational one. A lot of companies have become dependent on a working github and effectively have to down tools when it is down.

Being down for a few hours 2-3 times a month is obviously garbage from a reliability standpoint, but I think they will keep it going at just the level necessary to barely hold on to these customers.

> how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned

and this assertion is based on ... ?

this varies by field, most scientists have left twitter for good

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