Any day now, Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, will go down in flames. This will prove once and for all that Elon Musk is worthy of derision!
oh no!
anyway,
ARTISTS, JOURNALISTS, POLITICIANS, LEAVE TWITTER NOW, YOU IDIOTS
You’ll find that these professions have a vested interest in maintaining network effects, and as such will view Mast/Blue as threats to their networking infrastructure. They don’t want to dilute the importance of the platform their patronage systems rely on (let alone destroy it) - in fact its centrality is why they leverage it to advance their careers. Artists I can see understanding platform agnosticism to some extent, but for the other two groups, it’s simply not in their DNA. The gatekeeping is a feature for them.
‘The medium is the message’ as a Canadian theorist once said.
Sports journalists in particular — so annoying that all breaking NFL news goes through Xitter.
TAYLOR SWIFT WE NEED YOU! WHERE ARE YOU? DON’T LEAVE US WE NEED HELP!
This is obviously tounge in check but it feels closer to real than it should be.
Taylor Swift moving to another platform would absolutely cause a massive crowd to follow. Maybe we’ll see it happen one day.
Woe to the fediverse instance that experiences a Swiftie Tsunami
It would instantly become the swiftyverse and the rest of the fediverse would defederate. But still would be a positive change overall.
I almost want to have used x, so I could quit using it and improve this statistic.
But I never did
I never used twitter but I deleted my account right after muskrat bought it.
damn you beat me to it
Just sign up for bluesky and mastodon then. Become a statistic on that side.
Im on Mastodon. Rarely use it because I’m no fan of the format (same reason I never got into Twitter). I do jump on and follow causes that I support that switch to it.
That’s not how it works. They already didn’t use Twitter because it’s not useful to them, why would they use a similar service now?
Maybe they just never bothered to try.
Also while the platforms are similar, the users and thus the content are not just a smaller version of Twitter.
Great. Why are people still linking to x?
Anyone still on Twitter now is actively part of the problem
Uh, woah there. Why the extremeist view? I’m on there pretty actively for industry chatter. What’s the problem I’m a part of?
Yeah some niche communities that have nothing to do with extremists or politics at all are only on Twitter/X unfortunately. For example, I am into domain name investing and all my domainer friends gather on X to discuss our latest acquisitions and sales. I’ve tried to get people to move to Mastodon, but it’s difficult.
Yeah same in defi software engineering. All of crypto is on Twitter and calls it “ct” aka “crypto twitter”.
FYI, I’m referring to engineering, not shitcoin scam crap.
If I don’t keep up with stuff there, there’s no other places to follow the buzz.
What’s the problem?
The right-wing extremism and misinformation if you were actually wondering
Right, but I don’t see how simply being on the platform makes one part of the problem.
You’re giving them money and engagement with which to continue. Having your eyes on that content and then returning the next day to see more is explicit approval of that content. And having those ads served to you makes Elon money which he then uses to serve more ads to everyone.
Essentially, visiting X is paying Elon real dollars directly and telling him thank you for the propaganda, may I please have another
Adblocker works on twitter too though, and I don’t really mind Elon profiting from my use of Twitter anyway. People should be compensated for running social media platforms like twitter.
Something something lie down with dogs get, up with fleas something something.
Exactly. Don’t use it, let others live.
What? Using twitter causes people to die now?
Don’t use it (if you don’t wanna). Let others live (let others use it if they want to).
Ah, I see. Live and let live.
They’re still banning or driving away anyone outside of Musk’s echo chamber.
The vast majority of users are not big time contributors to the site’s quality content. But the content creators had the biggest targets on their back for retaliation. After so many bans over such a long period, there’s just less and less people to post quality content for the majority to consume.
Cracking down on narrative control doesn’t force the public to see things your way. It just drives them to other, more relevant platforms. Not sure how many times we need to go through this cycle for them to understand how futile this is.
Do you have evidence of this mass banning wave you’re referring to?
In X’s EU user base report consisting of data from February to July 2023, Musk’s social media platform had 112.2 million monthly active users in the EU. In the following six month period from August 2023 to January 2024, that number dropped to 111.4 million users.
That’s a minuscule drop % wise
X’s most recent report, covering February to July 2024, showed that its user base in the EU fell once more to 105.9 million.
And these are datapoints they release themselves, 3rd party data points hint at bigger losses.
You only need to hop on for 30s or so to realize why people wouldn’t feel inclined to spend time there unless it to quickly bathe one’s self in fascism and misinformation.
Sort of what America will feel like if Elon gets his scummy hands on political power.
If we can just get it to fail completely that’d be great, if that’ll make him a non billionaire
How would that make him a non-billionare?
He paid $44B for Twitter, even if it completely failed and he could realize no value from any of the assets. $44B is a small portion of his wealth.
I thought for a sec it was significant
Well, Elmo thought it was going to exceed 1 billion after 12-18 months.
I’d click on the link, but then I’d be contributing to the stats.
I do remember seeing this tweet quoted on the Elon missed prediction tracker: https://elonmusk.today/
You are a MAU if you use the platform once a month by opening the app by mistake, and also if you doom scroll for 10 hours a day.
You continue to be one if you go from one to the other. Musk has been cherry picking stats before, so what they release will be the nicest numbers they can find.
Yep. I’m in MAU numbers because I logged in twice this month to run Sky Follower Bridge. After the API debacle my average usage went from hours a day to zero minutes per day.
Even with the most favourable, most meaningless statistic he can pull he still can’t show growth or even staying in place.
Here is the data they are forced to report to the EU:
Logged In X Users 61.8M Logged Out Guests 49.6M Total 111.4M
https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/amars-in-the-eu/amars-in-the-eu-aug-24
“Logged out Guests” is everyone who gets linked to a thread, who was send an video on Twitter and so on. And also take a look at the definition of the logged in users:
EU Active Recipients of the Service - Average between August 1st 2023 - January 31 2024
So you do count as active EU user if you have logged in between August and January with an IP address from the EU. That should even include some tourists.
True, but we live in an economy that only rewards growth…
You’re assuming he gives a shit about how much profit it’s making.
It’s not a public company, it’s now his private playground to try to get millions of people to see only the “free speech” he wants them to see, and exert political influence.
He’d love to also milk it financially, but that’s actually really hard to do with Twitter.
You could say though as a capitalist he also gets a return on investment by manipulating public opinion in favour of conservatism.
I don’t think he even cares that much about money, except that it’s useful/needed for the things he wants to accomplish.
Unfortunately, the things he wants have gotten steadily shittier and shittier and more disgusting over the last 15 years.
You don’t get to become a billionaire, let alone the wealthiest person on earth, without being a greedy fuck. Remember he never actually wanted to buy Twitter, only tried hard to spin the narrative after being sued into it.
It’s even worse in social media, because most users that sign up stop using it at some point.
So the product can die pretty quick if they don’t generate new users, especially when they alienate old ones.
Indeed. Active users (say, used within the past month) is a much better metric.
I often wonder about this for many (especially older) YouTube channels - your channel is 15 years old, how many of your 500k subscribers actually still watch or even have active accounts?
I wonder what subscriber growth rate a typical YouTube channel needs just in order to maintain a consistent level of watchers?
It’s only a good metric if half of them aren’t bots.
Pretty sure YouTube has started unsubscribing people after long inactivity. I know some people have complained that it is difficult to follow infrequent contributors due to that now.
Is that if the channel is inactive, or the viewer’s account? It seems like if you watch anything else, it’s not a problem, but if you’re only subscribed to 1 infrequent channel you might have that problem?
From how it was described, I think it happens when you don’t watch something on their channel for a long time, either by the creator not uploading new stuff or the viewer not keeping up.
The problem was noticed by people trying to follow users like OnlyUseMeBlade who is unstable and has only been posting once every six months or so, but there is still a lot of interest about his potential return.
I see you attended the same business school as Elon. Yeah, great observation: businesses hate growth, and want to see miniscule declines, it shows strength!!
It went down hill fast. The amount of right-wing propaganda skyrocketed … weird
When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven’t used the platform since.
I stopped in today after months because my friend is launching a game and I wanted to give them a like and a comment. When I left Twitter my feed was just nerd shit and makers.
When I logged in today it was several right wing advertisements at the top. When I went to search it was more Trump shit. I just wanted to support my indie friend. That’s it for me.
I’ve just had to look out a morbid curiosity and yeah it’s all Trump. I am being encouraged to vote for Donald Trump. This is a man who is to anathema pretty much all of my beliefs, of course I’m not going to vote for him he seriously wants to be a dictator.
Also, I’m not American so I can’t vote for him anyway.
I already voted so I can’t vote for him either.
Tell your friend he should consider Bluesky
The only person I had blocked on Twitter before I deleted my account was Elon.
I swear I couldn’t be that annoying if I tried.
Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.
I’ve never had a Twitter account, but this makes me want to create one just so I can quit
Weird how right wing content and popularity has an inverse square power law. Sooooo weird.
I wonder if the right-wing content actually has increased, or if it’s just the ratio of it compared to left-wing content as much of the left has seemingly abandoned the platform.
My feed was almost entirely non-political to begin with, and personally, I’ve hardly noticed any difference, though the little politics that do get thru tend to indeed lean right.
I see equally amount both sides of I go looking. But I don’t go looking so I just see my industry related stuff and nothing political. I swear the level of fear momgering and exaggeration is wild.
Maybe. I only use it to troll them now, so maybe I stepped on my own foot.
I post gay porn. The number or right-wing rednecks that follow me with their public profiles is… confusing.
Exactly as intended.
X-actly as intended.
FTFY
I don’t think I’m tall enough for this ride, can I get off?
September 25, 2024
Oof, that explains why I had a feeling that I read it before
Who cares about users when Nazi ceo is high on Russian bot army
These billionaire special snowflakes sure go through a lot of effort to build safe spaces for themselves
And in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, and Buenos Aires, no es possible, nadie Vuela mas barato!
He’s burning it to the ground to try to get Trump elected.
I’m hoping he can burn both to the ground
There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.
I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.
Republicans, they’re not sending their best.
That’s been pretty clear for a few decades.
