Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.
Eh I’ve been reading this headline forever.
Call me when it’s Myspace.
Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.
Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.
It’s turned into such a cesspool of right wing nut jobs and musk groupies. Huge echo chamber.
What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.
To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.
Social media fatigue is slowly getting traction. I don’t have an article or study at hand to back it up, but I read about it the other day. Especially in younger generations it’s a trend already.
Also, but that’s only my personal theorie, i think it’s a trend only among the less-hateful people. Hateful people nonstop spewing their vile messages everywhere is making “normal” people leave, which then turns off even more “normal” people.
The enraged slowly turning (unmoderated) social media into one big echo chamber.
It’s really not fun to be on any of the platforms anymore, if it ever even was.
I don’t know if there will be a new thing, but if there is I think it can’t look like any existing platform as they’re all kind of trash and have largely the same problems.
I think there was also a naive technological optimism in the early 2000s and 2010s that has died off quite a bit. Tech companies came in looking like they were using some new type of capitalism that wasn’t all about the almighty dollar, but instead about progress more generally…now most of us know better.
“The platform struggles to attract and keep users”: why should I give up my data to an alt-right platform owned by a billionaire?
Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square"
He says it so clearly here which makes me wonder how people don’t realize it:
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
A private company that is in control of who is allowed to talk and what they are allowed to say. A private company that even decides what you hear and see while walking the square. Meanwhile also shovelling ads in front of you while you try to find the people you actually want to engage with.
“Social” media owned by private corporations is not social. Such media is anti-social, corporate control of public spaces that ought to belong to the people, just like they mostly do in real life.
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.
I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.
I think it describes it well.
Ah in this town square metaphor, don’t forget the private company’s CEO has a megaphone and talks over people, and outright kicks them out of the square if you hurt his feelings.
Maybe his idea of a town square is more like a place for Nuremberg rally events.
I use Twitter through a browser and ad blocker and the content is borderline dogshit as it is. I use it because inertia means the things I want to find are still represented there. But it can’t be long before some major accounts move elsewhere, or deprioritize their presence. I’m thinking mainly of news orgs, but NGOs and governments might move too.
Whenever I get linked to twitter, it tries to get me to login when I just want to scan the thread… I back out everytime now.
Same. It loads the page where the tweet would be, then it seems like 2 popups cover it up, both about logging in. I immediately no longer care about viewing what I wanted to see, and close the window.
Honestly I feel like that killed Twitter more than many other changes.
People tell me "there’s no way he (musk) would intentionally crash his own company - it makes no sense - “he’s just terribly bad at business!”
But is he really THAT bad? In what world could these changes be made in which he’s actively trying to improve the company? If nothing else, seeing the negative backlash, bad publicity and dropping number of users wouldn’t any sound minded business owner at least temporarily undo some of these changes?
With any business, if you make a change that causes you to lose customers and get bad publicity… don’t you try to mitigate the damage done? Who goes balls to the wall on obviously bad decisions?
He’s that bad at business. On Twitter, Musk has no workers to contain his bullshit or create a good public image for him. Nor does he have enough workers to keep Twitter running smoothly as it used to.
My point is, look I’m a dumb white hick. I’ve never ran anything as significant as this. Just from the way the guy talks I can tell he has eons more experience than I do. His track record? Jesus Christ.
Still, if I were him I would’ve just… stopped. Long, long ago.
Yet he hasn’t. Admittedly, I’m a dumb fuck yet smart cookie compared to some but honestly what are the odds that with zero experience I could make better business decisions than this guy?
Make it make sense, ya know? Explain to me like I’m 5 why he would make decisions that are so obviously detrimental to the company? What are the odds that I could give better business advice than this guy?
Yet this is what he’s doing. He’s either purposely destroying it or has some weird master plan and I’m not sure I can be convinced otherwise tbh. We all see it, as bad as he seems to be there’s no way he doesn’t.
He’s the best example of someone falling upwards. He’s not much more than a cash cow for other people running the companies that he owns and their successes are not happening because of Musk, they are happening despite of him. It goes as far as SpaceX allegedly using “handlers” to keep him from interfering with the actual development. I’m pretty sure that you, as a mod of !mechanicadvice@lemmy.world, have more technical experience as the guy who claims to be the genius behind Tesla.
The reason that Musk is making these obviously dumb decisions at Twitter is because it’s 100% his toy to play with and there’s nobody else running the show for him. What we are seeing is essentially the unfiltered effect that he has on a business.
Elon sounds like he’s experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.
Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he’s said about Twitter is crap and everything he’s done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.
I’ve seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don’t know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.
He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).
Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.
Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.
From what I’ve heard about his time at Paypal he really lucked out by basically being pushed out of the company with a golden parachute to ride out on.
You can view threads without logging in? I haven’t been able see replies/parent posts in months.
Except with Nitter, but that had to shut down too.
No, that’s the issue. I can see the post but not the thread so I bail.
I’m actually glad to see what’s been happening to Twitter because as much as it was started with good intentions and used to be a positive force for tech, it was also fundamentally flawed social media model. The basic problem was that only positive reactions were allowed - like, retweet, follow. This is NOT the town square, where you can get any reaction. It’s more akin to a dictator’s rally, where you’re only allowed to clap and booing is not allowed. So it’s no surprise that over time, it led to filter bubbles and the spread of mass delusions. Because you could say the craziest or most depraved thing, and all you’d hear is applause.
The basic problem was that only positive reactions were allowed - like, retweet, follow
Idk if I would call retweeting positive reaction, especially when that retweet is ‘look at this fucking moron’.
Yeah I think if anything twitter is a lesson in how even if you try to give users only positive ways to interact they will find ways to use them to interact negatively. Whether that be quote retweeting or ratioing.
what a save!
what a save! what a save!Or using a laugh react as a thumbs down.
A laugh react is more insidious than a thumbs down.
My point was that a laugh react is meant to be a positive interaction (what you said was funny, and I enjoyed your contribution) but has been co-opted as a negative reaction (I’m laughing at what a willfully ignorant idiot you are) because FB only wanted to provide users with positive ways to react. My concern wasn’t the level of negativity, only to provide the person to whom I was replying with a other example.
I think that was clear, my further comment was to highlight how far off (maybe), FB’s implementation intent has been from the way people are now using it.
Yes, in a joke or funny post the laugh emoji is used as intended. But in a more serious announcement it is the equivalent of mocking disgust, hence more emotionally devastating than a thumbs down.
Eg say someone posts a somber poem about their late father - a laughing emoji is saying “fuck you, I laugh at your pain or your shitty poem or the memory of your dad”.
The only question is, why, now that they’ve seen how it’s used don’t they let people disallow certain reactions. I’m assuming because emotional distress is more addictive…
What’s “ratioing”
When a reply to a tweet gets more engagement than the tweet itself.
When a piece of content that doesn’t allow downvotes, like a tweet, has lots more reposts than it does likes, the “ratio” is seen as proof the opinion was disagreed with, proportionally to the “ratio” itself.
I’m not sure which platform (fb, Twitter, YouTube???) it was, but it did count “unfollow” or “block user/block channel/block post” as negative feedback, limiting future reach of this person’s posts to other users of the platform.
For Twitter I’m apparently also a turbo user, as I get loading errors every day, after opening a few tabs quickly. Then it takes a while before I’m unblocked. Before Elon bought Twitter this never happened.
Elon was right when he said history will remember who killed Twitter, but we disagree on who
People acting as if twitter is something important. And killing it is meaningful. In Europe we don’t use it. Literally. I’m Polish, I never had a twitter account and don’t know anybody who has. The whole twitter/musk debacle is a war over nothing.
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I used to be really active on Twitter. Everyone was there: my friends, people in my industry, people involved in my hobbies. When Musk bought it out everyone left. I tried to follow them to Bluesky and Mastodon but they mostly just quit posting. Between that and Reddit falling apart I don’t often use social media anymore.
Weird, whenever I browse twitter I see loads of people of all kinds tweeting things.
It’s almost like “fewer people” is a distinctly different concept from “nobody”.
What do you mean Albuquerque has fewer people than NYC? One time I was at this cafe in Albuquerque and it was packed!
People on mastodon and lemmy keep saying twitter is dead, but it’s actually very active.
One of the idiots that replied to that comment of mine literally said they don’t go there anymore but looked at me like I’m some kind of idiot for just saying that people are still tweeting. Out of the two of us, I’m the one who still goes there, they don’t go there anymore.
So who do you think would know better about what’s going on on twitter as of late?
- The post you responded to didn’t say that Twitter is “dead”.
- People who still use Twitter are, in fact, idiots.
- NBC News does seem to be a more credible source than you on this topic.
As for me, it should be dead. I’m tired of having people link Twitter, as if any good person will join a discussion on there. It’s a digital parasite feeding off ad revenue and it should be taken down so people stop linking to it and posting on there.
Because the algorithm will always try to fill the timeline with something. It’s not going to show you empty spaces where tweets WOULD have been if people who left had been there.
I don’t see any empty spaces.
Yes. Because the algorithm fills them with tweets from other people. That’s why it seems like there are still the same number of people there even though there aren’t.
Whenever I browse Twitter I do it because others link to it
spoiler
, and a lot of porn originates from there
. I’m glad that people are moving away, because that means these not as many people will use it as a primary source, and post art and other stuff somewhere else.
twitter was overly woke before musk and after musk it edging close to being alt right.
gone were the days where people don’t get offended by the smallest of things and woke idiots using their nonsense to spread hatred and discrimination.
Can you define woke?
Woke is just a dogwhistle for bigots now. Instead of “I hate that there are gay people in my movie” it’s now “Going woke ruined this movie”.
I know, I was just curious how many steps it would take before they were honest about their own bigotry.
Of course they don’t have the balls to be, so instead stay vague and deflect.
my bad,it should have been woke extremism.
woke used to mean being alert to racial discrimination and/or prejudice used by black people.
nowadays perverted by sjw to be used as a weapon to discriminate and spread hatred.
So you mean racism.
basically bigotry, discrimination,racism not that much different used by right wing nutjobs.
Do you have an example?
reddit would be awashed with plenty but you probably can’t find much since the woke mods are banning and deleting posts and calling it whatever phobia they find convenient.
So no examples to back up your claim. Ok.
