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I don’t use twitter, so I don’t really care about what happens to it. I stopped using it years ago because it was an awful experience and I don’t know how anyon

I don’t use twitter, so I don’t really care about what happens to it. I stopped using it years ago because it was an awful experience and I don’t know how anyone can enjoy it. But I’ve been wondering: why is everyone leaving? Is everyone leaving? What has changed other than the verification thing?

captainkrtek 4y ago
I’m not a big user, but in the last week it’s become a lot slower and buggier. Sections of the site don’t work reliably, searches spin loading, had the site not load at all multiple times, more spam, etc. Seems the site is just coasting and issues are slowly building up.
ericsoderstrom 4y ago
Personally I've used it more in the past week than ever before. And if Elon's tweets are to be believed, DAU is also at an all-time high. So i guess the answer is: if people are in fact leaving twitter, more are joining
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Lost me at ‘if elons tweets are to be believed’. There is no reason I can think of where he would say DAUs are down. He just isn’t trustworthy with these stats.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  I'm not sure if more are really joining — a lot of people are gathering to watch to car crash, though. It's notable how much commentary on twitter is about twitter right now.
paulgb 4y ago
I’ve also noticed a palpable increase in spam, especially DM spam. Besides that, I think it’s just a loss of faith in Elon to run the place well. There’s already been so many unforced errors[1], and it’s only been a few weeks. People are trying to migrate their networks off now, because if they wait until the site is broken it may be too late. [1] laying people off and then asking them to come back, rolling out verification and then pausing it, forcing people back to the office and then locking them out of the office, losing the confidence of advertisers and blaming it on a woke mob, etc.
pessimizer 4y ago
> What has changed other than the verification thing? Nothing. People describing what has changed since Musk took over offer vaguer symptom lists than Morgellons sufferers. If anything, right-wingers who fell for the huge anti-Musk media campaign are getting upset because nothing at all seems to have changed other than the unfunny Babylon Bee getting their account back.
- kramerger 4y ago
  You missed the part where he fired the people running the place so servers are now dog slow, 2FA stopped working and scamming is at all time high. It's not left vs right, it's a shitty platform getting worse after just a few days with Musk.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > You missed the part where he fired the people running the place Nope, saw that. > servers are now dog slow, Missed that. > 2FA stopped working That's bad, but remember how they just got sued for using as an excuse to harvest phone numbers? I feel like we were upset about that back in the old days two months ago. > scamming is at all time high. Missed that, too. > It's not left vs right It's not, it's oligarch vs. oligarch, and I don't care who wins other than the people who had it were poor stewards so I'm pro-change. > it's a shitty platform getting worse Infinitesimally worse, within the first few weeks of a hostile transition. > after just a few days with Musk. Maybe give him a few more days then. Your tweets won't get cold.
  - nmeofthestate 4y ago
    > not left v. right The whole Twitter furore is so obviously at its base a political one that I have to take issue with your comment. From my observations the 'sky is falling', butt-hurt, desperate for Twitter to now fail group are very firmly on one end of the cultural-political spectrum. They're angry and affronted that "their guys" have lost control of it, because it's a very important thing to be in control of. We should stop dancing around it and acknowledge that there's a political aspect to this whole thing.
iudqnolq 4y ago
(Disclaimer: Hate musk, disapprove of Mastodon's fundamental architecture) I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week. As usual, the app freezes or crashes about three times a week. As usual, the app takes seconds to load what I click on about 5% of clicks. I'm worried it's not sustainable, though. At this point the vast majority of employees have quit. Musk's attempts to retain them suggest he doesn't understand his employees' thinking, suggesting he'll continue to have problems. So I'm continuing to use Twitter while actively looking for alternatives. When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue. This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    There are strong incentives to tolerare bad moderation. Given the choice between cutting off their users' friends and letting something slide moderators will often let things slide. This bears out in practice: There's a socially centralized network of sites that all federate with each other, and some loons and Nazis on the periphery. The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow. If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.
seydor 4y ago
The media love twitter though. They hate it so much they can't stop talking about it I have noticed that, on mobile web, the notification thingy about new thingies while you are scrolling has become persistent.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > The media love twitter though. They hate it so much they can't stop talking about it It's newsworthy. It's a leading social network which a billionaire was forced to purchase after trying to weasel himself out of the deal which he got into for dubious reasons, and now said billionaire is doing a corporate anihialation speedrun that threatens to evaporate 45 billion dollars. Not to mention the impact on other notorious companies such as Tesla and SpaceX. You require a massively disingenuous take on current events to come up to the conclusion that news coverage of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter can only be explained in terms of irrational hate.
  - seydor 4y ago
    Twitter is ranking #15 in social networks, but all the journalists are on it so it's all you hear about. The media (specifically, TV) chose to prop up twitter, and they can bring it down too.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  CBS has stopped using Twitter.
- abirch 4y ago
  The Media listen to their customers no matter what. When they found that they got more eyeballs and revenue by talking about a certain former president, they covered him more. If you say Twitter and Elon you're going to get more clicks than if you were to say YCombinator and Paul Graham even though the later two are vastly more important and educational for me.
  - seydor 4y ago
    are people really interested in elon's buyout? would be interesting to see if those stories are really popular. but journalists are on twitter all day, so naturally they write about it more https://www.nytimes.com/trending/ https://www.nytimes.com/trending/
kmeisthax 4y ago
For me, I had already reduced my Twitter usage specifically because of the awful experience, but I'd still occasionally check up on a handful of software developers (notably the Asahi Linux team) on there. I moved to Mastodon about a week ago mostly because the developers I was following did the same. No clue if everyone's leaving, I doubt it. As for what's actually changed: - Twitter Blue Verified was basically a satirists' wet dream and Musk wants to try it again - A number of high profile Twitter CxOs jumped ship, including their information security officer - Elon had every SWE in the company print out their code(?!) and physically deliver it to Musk, including an explanation of how much they wrote (presumably to try the old manager trick of rating projects on SLoC written) - Elon publicly blasted his own developers on Twitter for the performance of the Android app. When the head developer replied and explained what was actually wrong and how to fix it, he was fired by tweet. - Elon Musk issued a "Twitter 2.0" ultimatum to the remaining Twitter staff which were rejected by 75% of the company immediately resigning. I can boil these down further into two reasons why any software should jump ship immediately: 1. Data security & stability. Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. Expect basically all of your data on Twitter to get breached. 2. Solidarity. The Twitter 2.0 ultimatum is basically a demand for constant crunch time. This is very harmful to both Twitter and it's employees. Even if you don't work at Twitter and don't give a shit about the word "solidarity", you should still make an example out of the company anyway purely so that other boneheaded PHBs don't try the same trick.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. "Running on autopilot" is probably an even better analogy than you intended. There have been incidents of pilot incapacitation in aircraft, in which the aircraft continues flying for a long time following its programmed autopilot targets, until the fuel gets exhausted and it crashes. See for instance the 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...), the 2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King_Air_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King...), and a few others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gradual_decompression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gra...).
yodsanklai 4y ago
A lot of people who don't like Musk would like to use a different platform, and there's increasing concern that Twitter goes under now. But I don't think anyone is actually leaving. They are addicted to Twitter, and everybody seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use, even the more tech savvy.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > But I don't think anyone is actually leaving. They are addicted to Twitter I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I’ve left. I was definitely over using Twitter before. > everyone seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use I’ve had really no trouble at all with it? There’s an upfront decision about which server to use, but, that’s a social decision, not really a technical one. After that decision I’ve had no trouble at all
  - Twinklebreeze 4y ago
    I left, too. I don't really like social media, but I had just found the right mix of stupid but funny accounts to follow. I was checking Twitter every day. But I deactivated my account the day after the deal went through. I'd rather move on than patronize something owned by Musk.
  - abirch 4y ago
    This is from George Takei https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109370135755481726 https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109370135755481726 I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!
tbrownaw 4y ago
> But I’ve been wondering: why is everyone leaving? Is everyone leaving? What has changed other than the verification thing? The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced, well before it actually went through. I think users threatening to leave and calling for other users to leave also started at the same time. I rather suspect that this is due to Musk being from a different pillar[1]. (It's all gotten turned up to 11 now that he's actually in charge and seems to be showing off his :tableflip: skills, but it was already started before that happened.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation
- simplotek 4y ago
  > The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced (...) You're casually glancing over Elon Musk's reiterated announcements that he would eliminate Twitter's moderation, and you're completely ignoring marketing execs stating publicly and in no uncertain terms that Elon Musk's decision and actions were a liability in terms of "brand safety/suitability". https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921 https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    The very public reasons he initially tried to take over Twitter were disagreement with some of the political censorship decisions they made. AFAIK he's still banning trolls. Like for example that exchange regarding Alex Jones that got re-shared. . So, unless that meeting didn't match what's public, why would less political censorship be a "brand safety/suitability" issue?
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > The very public reasons he initially tried to take over Twitter were disagreement with some of the political censorship decisions they made. You're disingenuously glancing over the fact that Elon Musk repeatedly said and did different things. As the Twitter thread I linked early clearly shows, Elon Musk was repeatedly giving assurances to marketing execs behind closed doors that he would continue moderating hate speech and extremist content on Twitter just as before. The marketing industry is not manned by fools, and once Elon Musk fired basically all content moderators then the industry called Elon Musk out on his bullshit and promptly yanked ad spending on Twitter, explaining quite clearly that cutting moderation was a major liability. It's amusing how people like you prefer to resort to puerile convoluted conspiracy theories to explain why ad companies stopped paying for ads on Twitter when the people who made that decision already stated in no uncertain terms how Elon Musk's actions turned Twitter into a liability.
memish 4y ago
They're not. They hitting record level DAUs. I'm leaving Twitter is the new I'm moving to Canada.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Except you're very wrong. A quarter of a million people registered Mastodon accounts in the last 24, thousands per day prior to that... people are joining established communities and creating their own. And it's actually a lot nicer, in my experience (and I've heard the same from everyone else.)
  - anonymousab 4y ago
    Creating an account on another service doesn't mean you've left or are leaving the first one.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      How many people deleted their own Myspace account? If critical mass is hit, critical mass is hit and there's no turning back.
    - squarefoot 4y ago
      Still it's a lot different from yelling "I'm leaving!" and then do nothing. They now are exposed to the "competition", which is dangerous from Twitter's point of view, because now all it needs to lose those users is a bigger enough users base that attracts them into Mastodon, and the more users migrate, the faster the migration becomes. In electronics that would be called an avalanche effect.
cbeach 4y ago
People are declaring their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be owned by the blue tribe. Now it's owned by a member of the red tribe. That's all there is to it.
- memish 4y ago
  He's perceived as a traitor to the tribe, which is an unforgiveable offense. But he's not actually a member of any tribe.
olivermarks 4y ago
Nothing has fundamentally changed but it has always mutated in very weird ways and still is. I've been on Twitter off and on since fall 2007. In the early 'fail whale' days they had a live stream that didn't move ridiculously fast(when it wasn't broken) of all tweets. It became a huge 'surveillance capitalism' data mining product that has had some issues around free speech and political bias meddling by the company and obviously the big media companies. The platform is plagued by bots and trolls, automated attack agents that are presumably programmed to append derogatory comments to tweets by unknown actors. Now the mysterious Musk is reorging the platform, maybe to emulate the 'WeChat' 'everything app' Chinese approach. Who knows...if it's free you are the product...
michelb 4y ago
I started using a thirdparty app several years ago and I see none of the crap that’s on the web or in the twitter app. It’s a night/day difference and lets me follow the people I want or follow real-time events. I’m not sure how many people are actually leaving, in my list it’s about 30% at least. I think many people are leaving to not experience all the Elon stans get free reign and dunk on everyone in the name of free speech. I would hate for twitter to go away, but mastodon is such a trainwreck I think I will just cut out another social network if Musk tanks it.
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  > I’m not sure how many people are actually leaving, in my list it’s about 30% at least. Wow. The people on your list are nuts. Musk hasn’t even changed anything yet. The product is identical to what it was a month (or year) ago.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    The verification change destroyed a significant amount of value for me. As well, there have been moderation changes that I disagree with. It’s just not factually correct to say the product is identical to what it was a year ago. It’s not.
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      Can you elaborate a bit? What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
      - ncallaway 4y ago
        Sure. Lots of public figures that I’ve heard of, but don’t follow, make statements on Twitter. When I come across those statements previously, if it says George Bush with a blue check, I just trusted that George Bush made that statement. Now, I don’t. So, what used to be a fairly reliable way to get to a pretty solid primary source for plenty of statements has become unreliable. I’m not really worried about over the top parody, that’s easy to spot, but more subtle impersonations really concern me. If, say, the Defense Minister of a foreign country posts something provocative, it’s much harder for me to know if they really posted that or not. It doesn’t impact me as a user who posts things, but it has a serious impact on me as a user who wants to validate that X person really did say Y.
rconti 4y ago
I had a Twitter account (2, actually), and they had maybe 100 tweets. I never found value from it, the timeline was impossible to manage, the UI for quoting/replying was bass-ackwards and impossible to follow. I didn't care about "influencers" or "industry experts", I just care about friends and family (which is why Facebook is generally a better fit for me). But Twitter was specifically bad and hard to use because the content, such as it was, was so diluted by ads and recommendations. Musk lighting the place on fire was the final straw to get me to delete my account, but I never would have considered myself a twitter user. Mastadon seems better already. Although it's hard to tell, looks like they still for some reason have threads that are hard to read.

captainkrtek 4y ago

I’m not a big user, but in the last week it’s become a lot slower and buggier. Sections of the site don’t work reliably, searches spin loading, had the site not load at all multiple times, more spam, etc. Seems the site is just coasting and issues are slowly building up.

ericsoderstrom 4y ago

Personally I've used it more in the past week than ever before. And if Elon's tweets are to be believed, DAU is also at an all-time high. So i guess the answer is: if people are in fact leaving twitter, more are joining

nickthegreek 4y ago
Lost me at ‘if elons tweets are to be believed’. There is no reason I can think of where he would say DAUs are down. He just isn’t trustworthy with these stats.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
I'm not sure if more are really joining — a lot of people are gathering to watch to car crash, though. It's notable how much commentary on twitter is about twitter right now.

paulgb 4y ago

I’ve also noticed a palpable increase in spam, especially DM spam. Besides that, I think it’s just a loss of faith in Elon to run the place well. There’s already been so many unforced errors[1], and it’s only been a few weeks. People are trying to migrate their networks off now, because if they wait until the site is broken it may be too late. [1] laying people off and then asking them to come back, rolling out verification and then pausing it, forcing people back to the office and then locking them out of the office, losing the confidence of advertisers and blaming it on a woke mob, etc.

pessimizer 4y ago

> What has changed other than the verification thing? Nothing. People describing what has changed since Musk took over offer vaguer symptom lists than Morgellons sufferers. If anything, right-wingers who fell for the huge anti-Musk media campaign are getting upset because nothing at all seems to have changed other than the unfunny Babylon Bee getting their account back.

kramerger 4y ago
You missed the part where he fired the people running the place so servers are now dog slow, 2FA stopped working and scamming is at all time high. It's not left vs right, it's a shitty platform getting worse after just a few days with Musk.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > You missed the part where he fired the people running the place Nope, saw that. > servers are now dog slow, Missed that. > 2FA stopped working That's bad, but remember how they just got sued for using as an excuse to harvest phone numbers? I feel like we were upset about that back in the old days two months ago. > scamming is at all time high. Missed that, too. > It's not left vs right It's not, it's oligarch vs. oligarch, and I don't care who wins other than the people who had it were poor stewards so I'm pro-change. > it's a shitty platform getting worse Infinitesimally worse, within the first few weeks of a hostile transition. > after just a few days with Musk. Maybe give him a few more days then. Your tweets won't get cold.
- nmeofthestate 4y ago
  > not left v. right The whole Twitter furore is so obviously at its base a political one that I have to take issue with your comment. From my observations the 'sky is falling', butt-hurt, desperate for Twitter to now fail group are very firmly on one end of the cultural-political spectrum. They're angry and affronted that "their guys" have lost control of it, because it's a very important thing to be in control of. We should stop dancing around it and acknowledge that there's a political aspect to this whole thing.

iudqnolq 4y ago

(Disclaimer: Hate musk, disapprove of Mastodon's fundamental architecture) I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week. As usual, the app freezes or crashes about three times a week. As usual, the app takes seconds to load what I click on about 5% of clicks. I'm worried it's not sustainable, though. At this point the vast majority of employees have quit. Musk's attempts to retain them suggest he doesn't understand his employees' thinking, suggesting he'll continue to have problems. So I'm continuing to use Twitter while actively looking for alternatives. When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds.

smoldesu 4y ago
> it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue. This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  There are strong incentives to tolerare bad moderation. Given the choice between cutting off their users' friends and letting something slide moderators will often let things slide. This bears out in practice: There's a socially centralized network of sites that all federate with each other, and some loons and Nazis on the periphery. The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow. If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.

seydor 4y ago

The media love twitter though. They hate it so much they can't stop talking about it I have noticed that, on mobile web, the notification thingy about new thingies while you are scrolling has become persistent.

simplotek 4y ago
> The media love twitter though. They hate it so much they can't stop talking about it It's newsworthy. It's a leading social network which a billionaire was forced to purchase after trying to weasel himself out of the deal which he got into for dubious reasons, and now said billionaire is doing a corporate anihialation speedrun that threatens to evaporate 45 billion dollars. Not to mention the impact on other notorious companies such as Tesla and SpaceX. You require a massively disingenuous take on current events to come up to the conclusion that news coverage of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter can only be explained in terms of irrational hate.
- seydor 4y ago
  Twitter is ranking #15 in social networks, but all the journalists are on it so it's all you hear about. The media (specifically, TV) chose to prop up twitter, and they can bring it down too.
dawnerd 4y ago
CBS has stopped using Twitter.
abirch 4y ago
The Media listen to their customers no matter what. When they found that they got more eyeballs and revenue by talking about a certain former president, they covered him more. If you say Twitter and Elon you're going to get more clicks than if you were to say YCombinator and Paul Graham even though the later two are vastly more important and educational for me.
- seydor 4y ago
  are people really interested in elon's buyout? would be interesting to see if those stories are really popular. but journalists are on twitter all day, so naturally they write about it more https://www.nytimes.com/trending/ https://www.nytimes.com/trending/

kmeisthax 4y ago

For me, I had already reduced my Twitter usage specifically because of the awful experience, but I'd still occasionally check up on a handful of software developers (notably the Asahi Linux team) on there. I moved to Mastodon about a week ago mostly because the developers I was following did the same. No clue if everyone's leaving, I doubt it. As for what's actually changed: - Twitter Blue Verified was basically a satirists' wet dream and Musk wants to try it again - A number of high profile Twitter CxOs jumped ship, including their information security officer - Elon had every SWE in the company print out their code(?!) and physically deliver it to Musk, including an explanation of how much they wrote (presumably to try the old manager trick of rating projects on SLoC written) - Elon publicly blasted his own developers on Twitter for the performance of the Android app. When the head developer replied and explained what was actually wrong and how to fix it, he was fired by tweet. - Elon Musk issued a "Twitter 2.0" ultimatum to the remaining Twitter staff which were rejected by 75% of the company immediately resigning. I can boil these down further into two reasons why any software should jump ship immediately: 1. Data security & stability. Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. Expect basically all of your data on Twitter to get breached. 2. Solidarity. The Twitter 2.0 ultimatum is basically a demand for constant crunch time. This is very harmful to both Twitter and it's employees. Even if you don't work at Twitter and don't give a shit about the word "solidarity", you should still make an example out of the company anyway purely so that other boneheaded PHBs don't try the same trick.

cesarb 4y ago
> Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. "Running on autopilot" is probably an even better analogy than you intended. There have been incidents of pilot incapacitation in aircraft, in which the aircraft continues flying for a long time following its programmed autopilot targets, until the fuel gets exhausted and it crashes. See for instance the 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...), the 2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King_Air_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King...), and a few others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gradual_decompression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gra...).

yodsanklai 4y ago

A lot of people who don't like Musk would like to use a different platform, and there's increasing concern that Twitter goes under now. But I don't think anyone is actually leaving. They are addicted to Twitter, and everybody seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use, even the more tech savvy.

ncallaway 4y ago
> But I don't think anyone is actually leaving. They are addicted to Twitter I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I’ve left. I was definitely over using Twitter before. > everyone seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use I’ve had really no trouble at all with it? There’s an upfront decision about which server to use, but, that’s a social decision, not really a technical one. After that decision I’ve had no trouble at all
- Twinklebreeze 4y ago
  I left, too. I don't really like social media, but I had just found the right mix of stupid but funny accounts to follow. I was checking Twitter every day. But I deactivated my account the day after the deal went through. I'd rather move on than patronize something owned by Musk.
- abirch 4y ago
  This is from George Takei https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109370135755481726 https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109370135755481726 I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!

tbrownaw 4y ago

> But I’ve been wondering: why is everyone leaving? Is everyone leaving? What has changed other than the verification thing? The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced, well before it actually went through. I think users threatening to leave and calling for other users to leave also started at the same time. I rather suspect that this is due to Musk being from a different pillar[1]. (It's all gotten turned up to 11 now that he's actually in charge and seems to be showing off his :tableflip: skills, but it was already started before that happened.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

simplotek 4y ago
> The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced (...) You're casually glancing over Elon Musk's reiterated announcements that he would eliminate Twitter's moderation, and you're completely ignoring marketing execs stating publicly and in no uncertain terms that Elon Musk's decision and actions were a liability in terms of "brand safety/suitability". https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921 https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  The very public reasons he initially tried to take over Twitter were disagreement with some of the political censorship decisions they made. AFAIK he's still banning trolls. Like for example that exchange regarding Alex Jones that got re-shared. . So, unless that meeting didn't match what's public, why would less political censorship be a "brand safety/suitability" issue?
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > The very public reasons he initially tried to take over Twitter were disagreement with some of the political censorship decisions they made. You're disingenuously glancing over the fact that Elon Musk repeatedly said and did different things. As the Twitter thread I linked early clearly shows, Elon Musk was repeatedly giving assurances to marketing execs behind closed doors that he would continue moderating hate speech and extremist content on Twitter just as before. The marketing industry is not manned by fools, and once Elon Musk fired basically all content moderators then the industry called Elon Musk out on his bullshit and promptly yanked ad spending on Twitter, explaining quite clearly that cutting moderation was a major liability. It's amusing how people like you prefer to resort to puerile convoluted conspiracy theories to explain why ad companies stopped paying for ads on Twitter when the people who made that decision already stated in no uncertain terms how Elon Musk's actions turned Twitter into a liability.

memish 4y ago

They're not. They hitting record level DAUs. I'm leaving Twitter is the new I'm moving to Canada.

guerrilla 4y ago
Except you're very wrong. A quarter of a million people registered Mastodon accounts in the last 24, thousands per day prior to that... people are joining established communities and creating their own. And it's actually a lot nicer, in my experience (and I've heard the same from everyone else.)
- anonymousab 4y ago
  Creating an account on another service doesn't mean you've left or are leaving the first one.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    How many people deleted their own Myspace account? If critical mass is hit, critical mass is hit and there's no turning back.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    Still it's a lot different from yelling "I'm leaving!" and then do nothing. They now are exposed to the "competition", which is dangerous from Twitter's point of view, because now all it needs to lose those users is a bigger enough users base that attracts them into Mastodon, and the more users migrate, the faster the migration becomes. In electronics that would be called an avalanche effect.

cbeach 4y ago

People are declaring their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be owned by the blue tribe. Now it's owned by a member of the red tribe. That's all there is to it.

memish 4y ago
He's perceived as a traitor to the tribe, which is an unforgiveable offense. But he's not actually a member of any tribe.

olivermarks 4y ago

Nothing has fundamentally changed but it has always mutated in very weird ways and still is. I've been on Twitter off and on since fall 2007. In the early 'fail whale' days they had a live stream that didn't move ridiculously fast(when it wasn't broken) of all tweets. It became a huge 'surveillance capitalism' data mining product that has had some issues around free speech and political bias meddling by the company and obviously the big media companies. The platform is plagued by bots and trolls, automated attack agents that are presumably programmed to append derogatory comments to tweets by unknown actors. Now the mysterious Musk is reorging the platform, maybe to emulate the 'WeChat' 'everything app' Chinese approach. Who knows...if it's free you are the product...

michelb 4y ago

I started using a thirdparty app several years ago and I see none of the crap that’s on the web or in the twitter app. It’s a night/day difference and lets me follow the people I want or follow real-time events. I’m not sure how many people are actually leaving, in my list it’s about 30% at least. I think many people are leaving to not experience all the Elon stans get free reign and dunk on everyone in the name of free speech. I would hate for twitter to go away, but mastodon is such a trainwreck I think I will just cut out another social network if Musk tanks it.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
> I’m not sure how many people are actually leaving, in my list it’s about 30% at least. Wow. The people on your list are nuts. Musk hasn’t even changed anything yet. The product is identical to what it was a month (or year) ago.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  The verification change destroyed a significant amount of value for me. As well, there have been moderation changes that I disagree with. It’s just not factually correct to say the product is identical to what it was a year ago. It’s not.
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    Can you elaborate a bit? What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Sure. Lots of public figures that I’ve heard of, but don’t follow, make statements on Twitter. When I come across those statements previously, if it says George Bush with a blue check, I just trusted that George Bush made that statement. Now, I don’t. So, what used to be a fairly reliable way to get to a pretty solid primary source for plenty of statements has become unreliable. I’m not really worried about over the top parody, that’s easy to spot, but more subtle impersonations really concern me. If, say, the Defense Minister of a foreign country posts something provocative, it’s much harder for me to know if they really posted that or not. It doesn’t impact me as a user who posts things, but it has a serious impact on me as a user who wants to validate that X person really did say Y.

rconti 4y ago

I had a Twitter account (2, actually), and they had maybe 100 tweets. I never found value from it, the timeline was impossible to manage, the UI for quoting/replying was bass-ackwards and impossible to follow. I didn't care about "influencers" or "industry experts", I just care about friends and family (which is why Facebook is generally a better fit for me). But Twitter was specifically bad and hard to use because the content, such as it was, was so diluted by ads and recommendations. Musk lighting the place on fire was the final straw to get me to delete my account, but I never would have considered myself a twitter user. Mastadon seems better already. Although it's hard to tell, looks like they still for some reason have threads that are hard to read.