this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Technology

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The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.

So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.

On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.

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[–] [email protected] 120 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Umm... Only 13%?

I thought it would have been more...

[–] [email protected] 120 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The increase in the number of bots made up for the rest. The "pay a small fee to get an I'm definitely human sticker" scheme was really popular in the misinformation community.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Good point...

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Well, the question for me is how many active contributors have left. If those who leave are lurkers, it doesn't really matter. If those who leave are mostly creators, that's a serious problem for the platform.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago (3 children)

mastodon finally clicked for me and i don't miss twitter at all. sometimes i accidentally load twitter out of force of habit, but immediately recognize how much it sucks now and close it again. Likewise, reddit's dead to me too now. i'm finally starting to feel like decentralized federated social media systems might actually work out.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What is reddit? That shit site with psycho owners who want to go public because they are convinced they are successful, despite not being able to make any money and alienating their moderators and userbase? Lols.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

i started reading your reply in the voice of Dracula from the intro to Symphony of the Night XD

"WHAT is REDDIT 🍷💫💥 but a MISERABLE pile of SHITPOSTS!"

The 'net ill-needs a failure such as him.

His terms of service are as empty as his revenues!

all this to say, yeah fam 100% totally agree

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I will not call twitter "x" till the day I die

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I like Xitter, pronounced like xi- in Mandarin Chinese.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For those who want to know, that makes Xitter sound like halfway between Sitter and Shitter.

As an English speaker you can try to make that sound by saying the Y in YEET and paying close attention to how exactly your tongue is positioned and where in your mouth the air is being constricted. Then try to position your tongue as if you want to say "yeet" or "yes" again, but make an S sound at exactly the same constriction point where you made the Y sound before. If you're successful, it should sound like a hybrid between S and SH to your English ears.

That's how I make it anyway, actual Mandarin speakers might find issue with my explanation.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

It's only ever "the website formerly know as Twitter" to me.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One of my current favorite alternative is, "X, the web app you access at twitter.com", though given the logo that they chose I'm tempted to start referring to them as X11.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Rebranding Twitter, one of the most recognizable brand on earth, to "X" is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it's taking a shotgun, aiming at your feet and pulling the trigger.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Only 13%?? With everything he's going through, it seems very little to me. I think that the turning point would be top-level institutions and politicians changing Mastodon, I think that as long as that does not happen Twitter will still be relevant unfortunately

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

13% may not sound like a lot, but it includes almost all of the 10% who weren't complete idiots.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Choosing a single letter name was a marketing disaster. Elon is truly clueless when it comes to people and social. Even worse when X implies Ex anything.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe lengthen it to xxx.com? Think anyone owns that one?

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don’t think Twitter and Reddit are going to die quickly. They have user bases that they can monetize and bots to flood content. They were shitty enough that enough of left and gave a nice boost to federated platforms. That boost will grow every time those legacy platforms alienate their users by treating them badly. Like windows and Linux.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm convinced that muskrat did this to destroy a channel of communication. It sure helped me look for more free and open source alternatives. I never used Twitter other than seeing live on the spot events.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's embarrassing how low that number is. If there are alien civilizations out there, I think humans would be at the bottom of the barrel intelligence wise.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

It is probably like 50% of the users, the other 74% are bots that are still on the platform. lol

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I am 100% off social media now. Was never a big fan of Twitter but I'm definitely not paying for it. Zuckbook has been deleted for a decade. When Reddit disabled 3rd party apps, that was the last time I used Reddit.

I miss some of the timely news on specific topics but otherwise nothing's lost.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (11 children)

So what's the consensus here? Does social media not include things where people use usernames, or do Reddit and maybe even Lemmy count?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Reddit and Lemmy are definitely social media. A subreddit or Lemmy community is effectively the same idea as a Facebook group, just with pseudonyms.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i actually thought i would go take a look at threads. when i tried to log in on my PC it told me i had to download the app on my phone before it would let me log in with the account they already apparently created for me.

so i left and havent been back

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Nope. Nothing failed. This was Elon's gambit the entire time. He wanted to tank Twitter. He was never interested in improving it or making it profitable. Why do you think Saudi Arabia gave him 22B to buy it?

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Your position is that a wealthy man deliberately burned 22 billion dollars to destroy microblogging? That he's intelligent enough to plan and execute this perfectly, but too dumb to think of a better way to spend 22 billion on himself?

I think this theory falls apart on examination, to say nothing of Occam's Razor which argues heavily in favor of sheer incompetence.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This paints Elon like a calculated intellectual that carefully weighs his decisions and has a great team around him. When in reality, he’s a petulant, ego maniac that is far more swayed by his mercurial emotions than reason and intellect. His many prepubescent tantrums over the years is evidence of that.

Money doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make you a genius because you used your status to con someone out of it. If you don’t know how the tech works, Elon sounds like a fucking genius. A visionary. But if you are in the field, you’ll realize that his promises (living on Mars, brain chips, etc.) are just fiction.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure from the tone of your post whether you are trying to agree or disagree with my conclusion because it reads slightly argumentative, but I assure you I agree with you 100% and think this supports my point perfectly so maybe I'm misreading the tone. I upvoted you either way for being right in your points whether you come to the same conclusion as me or not.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

He burned 22 billion because he was forced to after being a doofus. He is not destroying microblogging, he is destroying the environment around microblogging on his platform. It is his new toy that was never worth what he paid for it, so there is little point (to him) in trying to recoup monetary value. It’s value is to him is being his personal playground.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ah yes, the good old 5d chess. Why would he do that

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What percent did Reddit lose?

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I'd be surprised if Reddit hasn't recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn't even a big sub.

I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

still, enough people have moved over here for Lemmy to finally replace Reddit for my use case (:

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reddit wasn't much bigger than this when I first used it. This feels a lot like Reddit in those days. It was a nicer place than today's Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Didn't a lot of people who create content leave, though? 10k OPs is more important than 10k lurkers for Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it's mostly wishful thinking unfortunately

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.

If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A must have browser extension to avoid accidentally adding to their traffic volume: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

It's certain that of the 120 million that remain, a huge number are bots or spam accounts of some kind. They will be there last "users" to quit the platform. And Elon will be happy to collect ad money to show those bots your ads until the very end.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there

And that's why it's only 13%

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It's better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

In related news, Twitter is up to 80% nazi billionaire despot disinformation bots now. Congratulations!

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