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.
Umm… Only 13%?
I thought it would have been more…
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.
Actually it makes sense. Look around and check how many people actually take action even if it’s inconvenient. Almost no one. For example Amazon and Uber are bad for society in ways that most people understand and are aware of (monopoly, gig economy, killing small businesses, exploiting workers) but what % of society actively avoid them? 5%? Less? So a lot of people will complain that Twitter under Elon is big source of hate speech and misinformation but vast majority will not do anything about it. Probably 5% left for this reason and the rest got annoyed with technical glitches and other changes. Most sheeple will keep visiting.
You had me until the “sheeple” thing.
How do you call people that do whatever everyone is doing without thinking about the consequences?
Amazon is a tough one. Definitely a ton of problems but online shopping in general is very useful for a lot of people. Demanding proper treatment of workers and supporting smaller businesses instead of feeding the monopoly is important and a good start. Giving up Amazon/online shopping would mean having much less access to products for a lot of people. Online shopping displaced catalog shopping, which has been around since Sears catalog days, and is unlikely to go away.
There’s plenty of other online shops. I avoid amazon and can get 99% of products from other stores. I would survive without getting the other 1%. People use amazon to save 15 minutes it would take them to find stuff in other places. They know the real cost of those 15 minutes saved but they don’t care.
I think you’re understating what Amazon adds to the online shopping experience. It’s not simply a matter of lazily saving a few minutes. But as long as you’re not arguing against online shopping altogether, which your original comment might suggest, I’m inclined to agree that not feeding the monopoly is probably the right thing to do. Of course, similar things could be said for any number of large corporations (Verizon, Comcast, Home Depot to name just a few). Is it people blatantly not caring or something more complex and insidious?
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.
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.
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.
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
Out of curiosity, can I ask what it was that made mastodon click?
I had two or three goes before realising that choosing the right instance can give you an engaging “local” feed. That seems dramatically less important on lemmy though.
i’m not so sure it was even my local feed that got me feeling like i belonged, really; more that I started reflexively defaulting to the federated feed and found it to be much more lively. Perhaps it was actually the changes brought on by time. Perhaps it was because twitter is rotting like a forgotten corpse in a warm, damp room and all the smart people who actually give a shit finally all started to say “fuck this” and enough of a critical mass has finally accumulated in federated services for them to affect its overall feel. I definitely see content from technically minded, creative, motivated people more on mastodon than i EVER did on twitter, but especially now. Twitter now is just … sad, and it reminds me that I have a better place that I’d enjoy visiting more.
I will not call twitter “x” till the day I die
I like Xitter, pronounced like xi- in Mandarin Chinese.
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.
Exactly what I go for. My Mandarin is pretty awful, however.
It’s only ever “the website formerly know as Twitter” to me.
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.
Elon must have spent so much on x.com yet it still redirects to the primary URL twitter.com
Probably because if he changed that, then the whole site would break.
And he fired all the people with the experience to make it work again.
Agreed. It will be Twitter for me till it die.
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
That’s just the 13% who have stopped using it daily I imagine, who were already probably super addicted to it.
Not sure if weekly/monthly users dropping out would be included in that tally. Also it says nothing about activity time from the daily users. It’s possible the users that stuck around may not be using it as much i.e. 1-2 tweets or comments a day now vs 10-20 before.
That’s just the 13% who have stopped using it daily I imagine, who were already probably super addicted to it.
It’s the opposite. As per the article, daily users remained consistent while monthly users saw the 13% drop.
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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.
Maybe lengthen it to xxx.com? Think anyone owns that one?
definitely not, seems completely original. Go for it elon!
People might confuse it for that Vin Diesel movie I guess, nothing else used 3 xs together like that though.
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.
It might never truly “die”, but losing 10%+ of active users is massive. Twitter got decimated. Literally.
First time I have seen accurate use of decimate and literally together (not a language prescrivist, just find this funny.)
Even Digg is still running!
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.
It is probably like 50% of the users, the other 74% are bots that are still on the platform. lol
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
Threads was launched before it was finished to capitalise on one of Musk’s more brain dead decisions - and the Threads website was initially almost unusable (it’s still missing a lot of things - such as federation with Mastodon).
The requirement to use a phone app, if it still exists, wasn’t nefarious, it was just the best they could do without delaying the product launch.
As for “the account they already apparently created”… AFAIK threads runs on Instagram’s infrastructure. So if you have an Instagram account then, yeah, “signing up to threads” is basically just enabling threads on your existing account. If you don’t have an Instagram account I’m pretty sure they create one when you sign up for Threads (but disable Instagram on your account unless you “sign up” over there).
I think Threads won’t try to federate with Mastodon, since it’s most likely to end up as a PR disaster. Half of the fediverse will de-federate with them from the outset, while the rest of them will have their fingers on the trigger. I don’t think the fediverse has any tolerance for their BS after their (and Google’s) rug pull on XMPP.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This wouldn’t be the first time it happened: Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
Obviously, to ruin the world and complete his turn into a Bond villain, he needed to tank the 5th most popular social media site, which has been proven over and over to have less influence than anyone thinks.
The most obvious explanation to me is that following so much success running pump and dump scams on his followers in some stocks but mostly unregulated crypto, he decided he was untouchable. Then tried to run another such scheme on twitter stock, but this time threw in a legally binding contract into the manipulation because he’s too dumb to realise how dumb he is.
He got so used to fucking around, he thought he’d never have to find out…
Ah yes, the good old 5d chess. Why would he do that
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The theory is that he secretly has shorted Twitter somehow. Which I could see, but it’d take an immense amount of planning that no one has picked up on. So, I’ll just continue watching the dumpster fire
He can’t short twitter, when he bought it he took it private.
Because he is throwing a tantrum. The toy he bought won’t do what he wants, and people won’t play with him, so he is breaking the toy. It isn’t a rational decision, it is a tantrum.
Well the banks that invested 13 Billion in the take over will not like that if it were true and will sue him.
Elon Musk: slams dick in car door
Musk Fans: Masterful gambit, sir!
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.
Saudi monarchy and other rich folks probably encouraged him further.
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.
So what’s the consensus here? Does social media not include things where people use usernames, or do Reddit and maybe even Lemmy count?
Reddit and Lemmy are definitely social media. A subreddit or Lemmy community is effectively the same idea as a Facebook group, just with pseudonyms.
The quantifiably different thing about lemmy is nobody is trying to trap you in a skinner box.
I mean it kind of ends up being a Skinner box anyway just because of the loop of scrolling, seeing a post, looking at it and repeating. But I agree nobody is actively trying to trap you in one.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites. It most definitely does not include anonymous sites. Social media has a strict definition about having connections to people, none of which Reddit nor lemmy has. Reddit technically added followers, but you cannot see nor interact with them, that’s not social media, that’s an email list. If lemmy is social media then so is every single comment section on every news site ever.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites.
So are you saying that Facebook Groups aren’t social media either? That’s a forum like site. Tumblr isn’t social media either?
This is Merriam-Webster’s definition of social media:
forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)
This is Cambridge’s:
websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or cell phone
Lemmy and Reddit both fall under these definitions.
Reddit technically added followers, but you cannot see nor interact with them,
Not sure what you mean by this… Reddit has had chats and PMs for a long time.
It most definitely does not include anonymous sites
Neither Lemmy nor Reddit are anonymous. They’re pseudonymous. Something like 4chan where you don’t even need an account is anonymous.
So are you saying that Facebook Groups aren’t social media either? That’s a forum like site. Tumblr isn’t social media either?
Correct, facebook groups is not facebook. It’s forum software hosted at the same url as facebook. Same as Facebook Marketplace. Marketplace is not facebook. It’s craigslist. It just happens to be hosted at the same url as facebook. Just like StackOverflow Chat is not question and answer software even though it’s literally hosted at the same url. Just like your phone is not social media even though you both create communities on it and communicate with people on it. If you don’t understand how servers work behind the scenes then maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, but a url is nothing more than a sign to put on the front of your building. You can then teleport the user to anywhere else in the universe and it can have absolutely nothing to do with the original location at all. This is the framework of the internet.
Lemmy and Reddit both fall under these definitions.
literally every single website on the entire planet meet those definitions.
Not sure what you mean by this… Reddit has had chats and PMs for a long time.
You cannot interact with your followers. I didn’t say anything about communicating with individuals that you see around the site. You have no way to know who your followers are you have no way to message your followers. You have no way to interact with your followers. Reddit is a forum software, exactly like every forum software before it.
Neither Lemmy nor Reddit are anonymous. They’re pseudonymous. Something like 4chan where you don’t even need an account is anonymous.
accounts have nothing to do with anonymity, maybe you’re using some layperson’s version of anonymity, but anonymous means it does not require real information. reddit and lemmy are anonymous.
literally every single website on the entire planet meet those definitions.
Complain to the dictionaries about it, then :) for now I’m sticking with the dictionary definitions.
but anonymous means it does not require real information
Every post you make on Reddit or Lemmy is tied to your username. There’s only one snowe@programming.dev and every post under that username is made by you. That’s why it’s pseudonomous, not anonymous - it forms an identity for you.
An anonymous system would have no way to tell that your posts are by the same person. See something like 4chan. You could post a comment or thread under the name “snowe”, but it’s anonymous because anyone can do that. There’s no way to connect your posts together.
I view the term “social media” as a continuum and not a box. There are degrees of “social media” with the extreme being sites built around using people’s “real-life” identities.
Well, social media has a definition. It is any media that allows you to be social. No matter if it is anonymous or not.
I should have said with the exception of Lemmy. Not sure I’m getting enough value to continue using it either honestly.
i am afraid that consensus among general population increasingly is “words mean exactly what you want them to mean at any given moment”. welcome to post-factual age.
Nah, language has always been in flux. We’re not going to become babbling morons any time soon. I mean, we even have writing now so we can save up a definition to adopt or reject later; that’s fairly new in human history.
What is a bit different is that we have to talk about a lot of things that didn’t exist a generation ago, but that’s only a matter of quantity. Every branch of the Indo-European language family adopted it’s own term for iron when it arrived, for example, so I’m sure we’ll settle on some sort of consistent English terminology for different kinds of platforms. We’re just not there yet, as the replies I got show.
yeah, no.
the person who wrote “look at me, i am so cool, i am not using social networks” on a social network didn’t do that because they would be confused by new technology that didn’t exist generation ago, they did that because it worked for narrative they tried to present. and unfortunately it is more and more common and it is not a problem related to technology, just look at any political discussion.
so while what you said is true, it is not very relevant to the discussed problem.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites. It most definitely does not include anonymous sites. Social media has a strict definition about having connections to people, none of which Reddit nor lemmy has. Reddit technically added followers, but you cannot see nor interact with them, that’s not social media, that’s an email list. If lemmy is social media then so are every single comment section on every news site ever.
Social media has always excluded forum like sites. Social media has a strict definition
social media has never excluded anything. it wouldn’t even be possible, and that is because there is no supreme authority that could issue some strict definition that would be legally binding for everyone 😆
social media didn’t come about until after the advent of facebook so yes, by definition it excludes anything before then. Forum software existed for decades at that point. At no point in time has forum software ever been included in anyone’s social media definition, except it seems like you.
Social media has a strict definition social media didn’t come about until after the advent of facebook so yes, by definition it excludes anything before then.
of course, sweetie. and just out of curiosity, what strict definition from some respectable authority other than you are you working with? 😂
social media, n. Websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
social media, noun : forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)
long story short, social media is more than facebook.
social media didn’t come about until after the advent of facebook so yes, by definition it excludes anything before then. Forum software existed for decades at that point.
yes, they did. decades before facebook. you just said that. what you probably wanted to say is that the term didn’t come out until… well here is the news for you. the term usually comes after the phenomenon it is describing, not the other way around. it doesn’t work like “hey guys, i have cool term - social media - now we just have to invent some” 🤣
anyone’s social media definition, except it seems like you
nice projection there. have fun.
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RSS allows you to subscribe on topic you actually like or want and ignore other stuff.
subscription on lemmy allows you the exact same thing. i don’t see how scrolling through your rss reader should be any different from scrolling through the lemmy app.
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A must have browser extension to avoid accidentally adding to their traffic volume: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect
you can use libredirect to include other backends too: https://libredirect.github.io/
What percent did Reddit lose?
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.
still, enough people have moved over here for Lemmy to finally replace Reddit for my use case (:
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.
once again, people turned out to be the root of the problem
The real answer was replacing human-human interaction with human-dolphin interaction.
Didn’t a lot of people who create content leave, though? 10k OPs is more important than 10k lurkers for Reddit.
If the content creators left Reddit, they certainly didn’t come here.
I don’t mean content creators necessarily, but people who post content.
Lurkers still give ad hits, probably even more than OPs
Yes, but not without content.
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.
this fits the narrative nicely but im certain a 2 percent trade for increased profits is not a loss for them
What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.
To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.
Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.
I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.
Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.
On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.
The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.
They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.
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Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.
Still plenty of people who can’t live without reddit unfortunately. We’re just in the initial crowd here. I really think FOSS at this point is the only way to a fair and open future on the Internet Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are great bastions for that.
On the other hand, the exodus catapulted Lemmy from being an obscure project to a well rounded one. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have as many problems these days as it had initially. Meanwhile, we are spoilt for choices on clients after many of the defunct reddit clients were repurposed for Lemmy.
I think my only concern with Lemmy is that federation is not guaranteed two-way. Some changes have broken federation in the past for certain instances where they can see everything but their comments or posts are not federated out. I would hope, at least in the future, this part of Lemmy would be difficult to break with an update.
I mean, I visit but don’t engage. I’ll browse but don’t really do anything on reddit since they made it so cumbersome and difficult to do anything there. Couple that with draconian mods/admins and you’re better off going elsewhere.
yet
Please don’t let this be another Reddit, i didn’t switch because i only wanted to get rid of the platform itself.
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.
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.
