Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts

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.

Totally on your page, but what you're describing sounds kinda like times square.

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.

And to top it all off, it's run by this guy in particular.

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk's increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It's a "public town square" where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

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?

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.

Yeah. Same. I moved to Mastodon, and then ended up getting my invite to Bluesky (two weeks before it opened to everyone...thanks Jack Dorsey...real helpful...). But no one is there. Mastodon has mostly tech and open source. Bluesky is...well...nothing that I can tell.

Unquestionably the winner of Twitter's fall was TikTok, when suddenly everyone including politicians started making accounts/posts. Which is likely a large part of the push to get it banned in the US. Because it's taking away users/advertisers from good ol' 'murican tech businesses owned by south african diamond mine nepo babies.

Bluesky

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'.

I would say that the "positive vibes only" trait is part of it, but the far bigger problem was the character limit. Even when it was double from 140 to 280, that still doesn't not leave room for nuanced opinions. And then, the least nuanced opinions also become the most easily spreadable. Both traits really reward our worst instincts.

Downvoting and disliking can have their own issues too.

On Lemmy, downvoting isn't really that bad, especially compared to Reddit, and that's likely because of the federated model where instance admins can't trust the authenticity of votes. On Lemmy, voting effects the score on the post and that's it, as opposed to Reddit where taking on too many downvotes will shadow ban or lock your account, even if you still have thousands of karma in the subreddit where it happened. Those restrictions also apply site wide. Lemmy users also don't have a global karma count, which removes most temptation to delete posts that go negative and self censor. Of course there are probably many people out there who would delete a post with a 10:1 negative score ratio. Then again if it's that bad then it might not be a bad thing to delete it.

Both models have their place and pros and cons. I understand the nefarious intent behind this change on Youtube, but I feel like hiding negative feedback so that only the poster can see it has potential. It could deter bandwagon downvote brigading. Dislikes are really only relevant to the algorithm and the user who posted the content.

Well said, I think that is the best explanation I have ever heard on the sites flaws.

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.

Yeah I've always thought of it as a "build your own cult" toolkit. On Twitter you too can try your hand at being a cult leader with followers that agree with everything you say.

I noticed that as well. Every once in a while there will be a link to something interesting om Twitter, but you only get basically a screenshot. If you try and do any other viewing you immediately get pushed for sign in.

Actually yeah, why would if you are new to Twitter would you go through the effort of signing up and beating your head against the wall to try and find some community on Twitter when you could just avoid it?

You can't just scroll around and check it out before you create your account. Your home page is probably artificially filled with the nonsense garbage of the owner making his own big statement and the ads you can see are for ball tanning, so you aren't even sure you cAn trust the sponsors.

If you were young and not yet on it, why would you join unless you want to argue with assholes or try to get someone to lend you some crypto because you think it will get you out of your shit life.

That you lose only 18% of your users?

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.

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 something you see endless repeated. When there is no rules, you get the loudest, baddest, pieces of work, rise to the top and then set rules that favour them. Look over the world and history, where law and order has broke down, war/drug lords take over.

I lived in Holland for a bit, my Dutch colleagues told a story of the bus system. Holland tried a honor payment system, trusting people to pay what they needed to for their trip. It failed hard and was replaced with fair collectors my colleagues called "the bus Nazis".

The same thing happens with free speech absolutism. You hit "Paradox of tolerance".

Anarchy just doesn't work. You need rules for everyone to play nice by.

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.

Don’t forget the endless “Pussy in Bio” advertisements that are now filling up most feeds.

It would get attention, but can that attention be translated into ad revenue? So it doesn't really help Musk out, and would be a bad move. So it seems like a stupid thing to do. So he'll probably do it.

Not really. His wealth isn't in money, it's in shares of companies like Tesla. If Tesla drops in value his wealth drops. If he sells shares in Tesla to subsidize Twitter, the value of his remaining shares in Tesla drops. Which is why he borrowed a lot of money from the Saudis to acquire Twitter. Using Tesla shares as collateral. Tesla stock is crazy overvalued, and he's leveraged it to shit. It's possible Elon Musk could be bankrupt in a couple of years.

For that I can give you a handy twitter analysis you can apply to every comment you write:

Your opinion is wrong and probably racist.

Can you define woke?