Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests
Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have repeatedly said the platform’s usage has risen.
You’re telling me the company that once had ads for T-Mobile and Volkswagen and now almost exclusively has ads where random bots with NFT photos advertise ChatGPT ‘services’ isn’t doing well financially??
It's important to note that "doing well financially" isn't just revenue and user count, it's also expenditures. If Twitter has managed to cut costs by more than whatever its income has dropped by then that could well be a good outcome for it, I've heard it wasn't profitable when Musk took it over.
It's kind of ironic how big companies are frequently criticized for fixating on "endless growth" and "line goes up", and then when a company or organization sheds that it also looks bad.
There's so much wrong with your understanding here...so I'll just point out that you're talking about Twitter as if it's still a public company, it's not.
Also, Twitter was never profitable, and it was likely never going to be profitable. But there's a big difference between their losses and projections before Musk, and after.
If "lines goes up" meant things get better for the customers, the employees, and the world in general, then people would be cheering it on. Usually it means it gets worse for at LEAST one of the three, and sometimes all 3.
Here, "line goes down" is following Twitter getting worse for the customers, the users, the employees, and the world in general. So people will cheer as it crashes.
Twitter has 1.3 Billion / in interest payments alone as it took on $13,000,000,000 in debt for the honor of being bought out by Elon Musk.
The owners of that debt have been quaking in their boots all last year. As Bankruptcy proceedings would make them the new owner of Twitter.
Note that Twitter made $5 Billion revenue on its best year, and that's likely halfed or worse.
EDIT: $5 Billion revenue on its best year. Far less today and you still have all the OTHER costs going on. I'm sure Elon will prop up Twitter with Tesla ads or something but Twitter cannot stand by itself anymore.
I thought Twitter's infrastructure was going to collapse within weeks after Musk made all those cuts and changes. I was obviously wrong because Twitter's infrastructure didn't collapse. I'm not speaking to the user experience on Twitter but from a purely infrastructure perspective, Musk was right and I was wrong.
What the fuck is the other 70%'s problem?
He kept the 70% he wanted, it'll be a propaganda engine and communications platform for the right wing.
I have a lot of friends that won’t quit because of sports updates and all the shitposts
This is in addition to the first year of losses, which are likely higher.
Sunken cost fallacy
There are a lot of quasi-celebrity types with a big following that don’t want to give up their follower base.
I'll bet it's more than 30% left but bots backfilled the space.
My problem is that I never had a Twitter account to stop using it lmao.
How much did human usage drop? Because there are a shitload more bots on twitter nowadays than there were in the years before he took over.
This should be human usage - the user survey was done by phone.
Any time something gets too big it gets bots. Lemmy will be the same. We will see instances getting defederated who cannot manage the spam.
Fuck Elon though
Any time something gets too big it gets bots
Dead internet theory, summed up in a sentence
I suspect even more than 30%, and by a lot. Nearly all of the communities that once thrived seem to be dead. It feels very empty.
Wasn't like one of his focuses going to be getting rid of bots? Did they just not do anything and the bots just invaded or did the bots just get better?
He got rid of like 80% of the staff. I doubt he has a functional team who can even tackle the problem.
I think the focus on bots was primarily used in an attempt to back out of the deal. It was never an issue, especially if it inflated his ego by pumping up his account.
Ever since Musk's control of the company, Twitter (I refused to call it X) showed me multiple hate and racists posts. Basically, Twitter is showing me garbage. I now use Mastadon instead.
I was never active in terms of posting but I followed several news outlets, local government agencies, and a few friends. Shortly after Musk took over I saw nothing but right wing nutjobs and a lot of posts from Musk. I tried unfollowing but nothing worked so I quit logging in. I need to cancel my account but haven't taken the time.
Yeah, I had a Twitter account but rarely used it. Shortly after Musk took over, his account was in recommendations and his tweets were in my feed, even though I'd NEVER seen them before.
I blocked him.
He remained at the top of my recommendations.
I think I even occasionally saw his posts when they were retweeted or something by someone I didn't even follow, because the retweet was trending, I guess?
That's when I deleted my account.
Facebook does that for me too, alongside flat earthers, anti EV crap and the occasional funny picture. It's depressing.
Oh yeah, the flat earthers, the pictures with lens flare on it being proof of "planet X" and other insanity? The best comedy I've ever seen.
I'm back to calling it Twitter. (Not that I'm ever on it though.)
It's such a stupid name! Everytime it's mentioned, it has to be prepend or suffixed with something so people actually understand the "X" context.
And more importantly - If you visit x.com, it redirects to twitter.com! So what's the fucking point of the rebrand?
Genius, i say! The man’s an absolute genius!
Obviously. Some people say trump should run a social media platform. More and more.
Until he stops allowing deadnaming on his site, I'm going to deadname his site.
It's only fair.
Xitter, but the X makes a ‘sh’ sound.
I haven't stopped calling it twatter
I call it the x social media site
Needing to log in to view someones tweets means now I wont even visit the site when linked. Kinda the number 1 rule of platforms is to make them accessible to those that don't already use it, so as to convert them later. Musk, and everyone around him letting these decisions run through, are idiots
ran into this last night.
I hate twitter, but there was something I was trying to see and the only way to get the info was from a twitter post. Couldnt view the goddamn twitter post without creating an account and logging in.
My immediate thought was "This isnt important enough for this bullshit" and immediately gave up.
I'm convinced this login to view shit is to hide the explosion of right wing white supremacy/racism/etc posts and the bots echoing and amplifying it from people before they commit themselves to an account.
I wrote this right as the first elon buying Twitter mentions were popping up...
Notably, Twitter facilitated communication during the arab spring, where the people organized to stand against and even overthrow several broken and corrupt government regimes throughout the middle east - including some participation in places like Saudi Arabia, for example.
Twitter's second largest investor after a musk takeover... the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it's de facto leader who, among other things, killed and dismembered an American journalist without consequence somewhat recently.
And now Twitter is about to be killed... and dismembered.
How the fuck is that all?
Bots on bots on bots.
This article is a survey of Americans, not a computerized search.
Unless a number of bots answered the telephone survey, I think the stats here are legit.
I’m sure a lot of the original population has dropped by a lot more than that, but in numbers they would have been replaced by an influx of fascists and bots.
I'm taking note of all the prominent individuals and organizations which chose to remain on the fascist platform and thus implicitly support it.
What the fuck's "x"?
X is one of his older websites, a financial platform that he created after his first startup was sold. Name comes from "X marks the spot" from old treasure maps, was to be the place for all transactions.
It struggled and didn't really get off the ground, but was able to merge with another platform called Confinity, run by Peter Thiel. The merged platforms then became PayPal, and made both guys rich as shit. Thiel eventually power played Musk and got him kicked out of the company, arguably for good reason, though Thiel is quite a piece of work, too.
The new X is Musk's attempt to make twitter more like his old site, and is why he was throwing around things like making it a peer to peer payment site, similar to WeChat / WePay or Venmo. How he plans to make tweets into bank transfers I've got no idea, esp. when losing 30 percent of users.
Pretty much he wants to turn X/Twitter as WeChat's clone for the West.
As WeChat is both a messaging and payment app used by a couple of hundreds of millions of users in China where people can send money, split bills, pay, etc. using the app.
Visa and MasterCard are extremely profitable companies enjoying really high margins and having very little competition. And this is very lucrative business:
66% operating profit margin for Visa and 55% for Mastercard (four-year average). 51% net profit margin for Visa and 45% for Mastercard (four-year average). 50% per annum return on capital employed for Mastercard and 21% per annum for Visa (11-year average).
It's his favorite letter or something. He'd wanted to name something X for a while. The closest he got before was SpaceX. Which I suppose now retroactively means SpaceTwitter.
There's also the poor kid that he named 'X Æ A-12,'
An obsolete windowing system for UNIX like operating systems
obsolete? say that after trying wayland on an nvidia card.
He sure has a lot of X's
And O's!
A robot created by Dr. Light with the capacity to reason and make decisions on his own, unbound by the laws of robotics. Could also stick to walls.
who cares
How could the jews do this to me :(
-Musk
That sounds like bragging. Why aren't more people stopping this crap?
Who the fuck is still on that shitpile? Dudes. Stahp.
porn?
I deleted my account and haven't missed it at all. Then again I was never good at making use of Twitter, it's too hectic and disorganized for me, and I have the same problem with mastodon.
I'm glad I'm not the only person that doesn't really understand the whole Thing behind Twitter / Mastodon feed thing.
Oh you mean Twitter?
Yeah, ‘X’ is never gonna happen.
How do you measure the percentage of people who never used it and are now saying "Oh hell no, not ever!"?
By big arms open wide.
Doesn't surprise me. Musk has cultivated and emboldened racists, homophobes, cryptobros, misogynists, and the far right and the platform has turned into a cesspit. Meanwhile scammers & bots run rampant and the blueticks stink up every thread with cretinous remarks and trolling.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have just given up with it, or moved to another social media that isn't so toxic.
It was that way before Musk foolishly bought it.
Not really. Pre-musk, reporting racism & other abuses was more likely to illicit a response than not. Nowadays it is a was of time to even bother unless it is extremely overt.. And all the shitheads with few exceptions who were perma banned got reinstated no matter how awful they were.
And the situation with blueticks is self evident. It used to mean somebody noteworthy - journalists, actors, politicians, authors, scientists etc. Now it's trolls and narcissists with money to waste on a vanity tick. Popular feeds will have pages of inane comments by these scumbags to scroll through. There are even actual Nazis with blueticks who complain/brag about the ad revenues they receive from engagement. It couldn't be any more removed than the way it was.
I feel the same way. I'm only ever on to check for updates on certain companies and games I follow. I wish they would adopt anything else.
I've been using Bluesky more. It is better with feeds and a way less toxic general user base.
Definitely. I think it has just about reached a critical mass users writing content to attract new users and it looks so similar to Twitter there is practically zero friction in moving. I think it'll really kick off when we see more heavy hitters coming over - big news networks, public figures, governments etc.
I think news orgs in particular should be removing themselves from obnoxious social media platforms (e.g. Twitter) and move to somewhere where the engagement is more genuine and not toxic rants by racists and morons.
I'm part of the 70%.
I use it exclusively for gay furry porn.
Disgusting.
I expected better from a gay furry porn aficionado
The way God intended.. with tegridy..
I thought bluesky was for that.
Good
The 2022 and 2023 usage data was gathered through a national telephone survey of about 1,500 people aged 12 and older—further details and methodology for the 2024 usage data will be released on March 28, according to Edison.
What an interesting choice for collection method when you're assessing a social media website in 2024.
I would find it more plausible that only 30% remains.
Concerning
The whole Musk takeover is much less relevant (in the sense of interesting) for people outside the western context. I asked a few friends in Japan why they still use Twitter, but they just don't care about the platform and ownership as long as they can still interact with their friends there. Curious how the botification will affect that over time, though.
good
Well If you take in account how hard has "The Chief Xit" tried to destroy Twitter and piss off anyone using it, this is actually unexpectadly good result! More Powah to the Man Child 😂 . Also - there is no longer the $1 payment for account creation - I guess bot traffic is better than no traffic 😂.
“suggests” is a pretty weak level of conviction
I miss the OC porn and algorithms but it's whatever. I like Mastodon
It's a shame that other platforms that are growing for artists is just another monopoly one (bluesky) or defederated from everything and even bans the use of VPN to access it now (misskey.io).
pixelfed
Where did those people go. Some Mastodon,Bluesky but the Rest?
It's not really a zero sum game is it
Twitter's for #fascists.
Well If you take in account how hard has "The Chief Xit" tried to destroy Twitter and piss off anyone using it, this is actually unexpectadly good result! More Powah to the Man Child 😂 . Also - there is no longer the $1 payment for account creation - I guess bot traffic is better than no traffic 😂.