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Twitter is dying
- version_five 4y agoI believed these articles at the beginning. I spend a bit of time on Twitter now and it appears to me to be as vibrant as ever. Everybody is still there (including all the insane people) there's tons of engagement. It really feels to me like most of the criticism is being manufactured.
- idiomaticrust 4y agoWell, I think that criticism is valid. The thing is that there is no good alternative. Elon can break a lot of things and people still will be there.
- fsflover 4y ago> no good alternative Depending on how you use Twitter, Mastodon might be a good alternative.
- version_five 4y agoThat ship has sailed. In the first few weeks there was lots of buzz about alternatives, PG had a little fit and spent about 15 minutes exclusively on mastadon etc. The buzz is gone now, something big will have to change for it to get it's momentum again.
- krapp 4y agoMastodon is doing just fine, from what I can tell. I don't know why people keep pushing the narrative that an alternative platform has to capture Twitter's userbase in its entirety or else be considered a failure. Not everything is driven by buzz and hype.
- guerrilla 4y agoMastodon is doing great. Just passed 10 million users a while ago and now has a sustained network effect of around 2000 users an hour. Numbers aside the community and experience is awesome. No idea how people still use Twitter.
- nradov 4y agoWhat specifically is broken? I only use Twitter occasionally but it seems to be working fine.
- idiomaticrust 4y agoIf you use it occasionally you didn't notice: - not working notifications - broken feeds - random delays in loading the page
- blackflame7000 4y ago[dead]
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoWe are still in the short term after Musk's acquisition, wait a year/two, if these articles are already circulating now… I don’t see a very bright future for Twitter.
- Steven420 4y agoThe article's exist because the author's don't like that Elon owns Twitter not because the future isn't very bright for Twitter
- klyrs 4y agoMusk himself said that Twitter has lost half of its valuation. Twitter took out a $13B loan to be bought (I still don't how how that's even a thing, but here we are), and now it's worth, what $22B? If this keeps up, the value of the company will be less than its debt to the bank fairly soon. That looks like a nosedive, love or hate musk.
- leobg 4y agoGiven the kinds of articles that circulated about Tesla back in 2008 already, they should be bankrupt. Given the news that are circulating every day, we should all be dead. We laugh about the ancients when they tried to predict the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals. But to try to predict it from news articles on the web…? The entrails reading ancients would be laughing about us!
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoTwitter has lost half its valuation since Musk bought it. You don't need internet thinkpieces to divine the direction of that arrow.
- chatmasta 4y agoThe only source for that current valuation is Musk himself, whose source was sticking his finger up his ass and picking a number that sounded low enough to motivate his few remaining employees to make it higher.
- bmarquez 4y agoI agree with this assessment. Early on I took these types of articles seriously but at this point I think they're writing what they want to see happen, not what is actually happening. If people want Twitter to die (note it's 2023 and AOL is still around so it might take a while), something better has to come along.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago> If people want Twitter to die (note it's 2023 and AOL is still around so it might take a while) Like AOL, Twitter will be dead in every way that really matters long before the corporate entity is shut down.
- chatmasta 4y agoAmusingly enough, AOL owns TechCrunch, although I suspect you knew that... It's kind of funny how Twitter became what AOL once aspired to be - a walled garden where all that separates you from your destination is a single #keyword.
- SilverBirch 4y agoI think it's a mistake to ignore these articles for two reasons - 1 mechanical, and 1 structural. The mechanical reason - headlines are clickbait, no twitter isn't literally dying today, but read the article and it is making some pretty legitimate points. The second, more structural reason is a common theme with brand equity, you can do a lot of things over time to damage a brand and non of them invididually will sink your company. But these shots to the company accumulate, and eventually it's gone too far to come back from, you can't recover. To a certain extent you saw this with digg, the redesign was the obvious exodus point, but the trust had been lost far earlier - people were ready to walk away. In the same way, Twitter doesn't look today like it's collapsing, but it's done a lot of permanent damage to itself. That broad base of quirky and interesting people you used to follow on twitter? They're not there anymore, they don't want to be on that weird homophobic guy's platform. Some of the people have stayed, but those communities largely exist on other platforms now, Twitter is no longer the centre of gravity. But those aren't the thing making twitter a billion dollar platform. The platform is still busy, but it's full of crypto bros and VC influencers, people who will take great pride in telling you how AI is going to make <person with high social status> unemployed. But that's not a healthy ecosystem - those are the guys who move in to try and farm social capital from the high status individuals, but the high status individuals aren't there anymore - a deliberate move from Elon. So yeah, it's still alive, but to some extent the value has already walked out the door. There hasn't been the big bang to crystalize this yet, but it seems highly likely that Twitter has given up its space as a cultural centre-peice. The cool kids have moved on.
- user_named 4y agoOnce there's a legitimate mainstream alternative that gathers a user base and is easy to use, Twitter might significantly decrease its userbase. For example, Meta launching its Twitter alternative and acquiring Instagram users onto it.
- chatmasta 4y agoThis argument would make a lot more sense if people actually gave a shit what TechCrunch or CNN had to say. In fact it's the opposite, and you see audiences actively resisting whatever agenda the "mainstream media" transparently broadcasts as its goal, to the point you get people entrenching themselves in contrarian positions they wouldn't even be able to justify if you asked them to.
- karp773 4y agoTons of bots. EDIT: It used to be crypto bots. Now it's mostly american far right (or foreign agents pretending to be american far right) bots. Sorry, no link here, just personal experience.
- prottog 4y ago> Now it's mostly american far right (or foreign agents pretending to be american far right) bots Is it possible, given the revelations of the Twitter Files, that those viewpoints were (whether bot-originated or not) suppressed until recently?
- agotterer 4y agoI’ve seen a huge reduction in bots over the last 2 months. I hardly get tagged by them anymore and I rarely see them in my feed. Edit: grammar
- guerrilla 4y agoAre you unpopular? I have around 1k followers and my inbox is constantly filled with spam now.
- wetpaws 4y agoNot in my feed.
- mustacheemperor 4y agoPersonally, I've stopped ever using Twitter for more than a couple minutes in an incognito window once or twice a week. My entry point to Twitter was typically links shared on social media, at which point I'd often check up on my follows, scroll the feed etc. As of sometime recently every time I follow a Twitter link on social media in my regular browsers a warning comes up shaking me down for money to continue using SMS 2FA or disable it altogether, so I just open it in incognito or, better yet, not at all. I thought 2FA was an entry level account safety requirement these days, but apparently now it's a premium monetized feature! Maybe Tesla can take a cue from this book, and offer curtain airbags only to premium customers.
- andrei_says_ 4y agoRight now, it is not possible to like tweets, to view threads, or to view someone’s activity. Most images don’t load. This is not the news. The news is that this is not an event deemed significant. This is the norm.
- idiomaticrust 4y agoIf it's from TechCrunch, than it must be true ;) But seriously, there is no good alternative on this market at this moment yet.
- rvz 4y agoWith 220M+ daily actives? Nope. Like Meta verified, now everyone has to pay for a checkmark or blue tick to show that you are not a bot. Even if you are running one, it won't be entirely for free nor will there be freedom of consequences like it was before. Identity verification on this, will be a tiny price to pay for that blue checkmark. But it is actually journalists that are running scared of ChatGPT and GPT-4 that actually 'dying' and feel the need to write nonsense like this. TechCrunch editors not only still use Twitter, but they still need it.
- redleader55 4y agoNo, Twitter is no dying no matter how much Elon Musk makes a fool of himself. Controversy is good and he's pretty good at stirring controversy around him. Initially the payed checkmark will open up a small stream of revenue for social media companies - Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, etc, later it will be used for identity verification - first by paying a sum, which can be traced back to a bank account and later by uploading official documents or linking to some government service. Twitter or Meta could be identity providers and get actual money for providing this service for other platforms. I can see Twitter & Meta being the providers for the "internet passport" in the future. Bleak, but possible and lucrative.
- Zigurd 4y agoWhy is the advertising crap and scams now tho? If Twitter were benefiting from Catturd and other luminaries, wouldn't it be wall to wall Apple, Nike, and LVMH?
- mr_coleman 4y agoEveryone is cutting back on marketing. Scams are always buying and make their most money during hard times.
- bmarquez 4y agoAt least on my Twitter feed I still get a lot of Apple ads (Nike and LVMH aren't my demographic).
- EricE 4y agolol - the moaning about the elite loosing control of their favorite platform continues! I'm sure when we come back five years from now not only will Twitter still exist, but it will be bigger and the same people complaining about it's death will also still be on there and not Mastadon!
- LeafItAlone 4y agoYou think the elite has _lost_ control of Twitter? The same company the richest person in the world bought?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gbertb 4y agoTechcrunch is garbage now a days because of articles like these
- aiphex 4y agoThis article felt like long-form Twitter. A bunch of words that go nowhere.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago> However if the point is simply pure destruction — building a chaos machine by removing a source of valuable information from our connected world, where groups of all stripes could communicate and organize Do people seriously think Musk is this much of a comic book villain? The article doesn't back up its assertion.
- voldacar 4y agoThinking of Musk as a comic book villain is a political signal now, so members of a certain political tribe are incentivized to one up each other in performing this signal publicly
- braingenious 4y agoI don’t think that many people think of Elon Musk as a comic book villain. From the article: > It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying. There is a small but fascinating group of Musk superfans that can’t seem to imagine _anyone_ that would question his intelligence. Even when someone writes “stupid clueless idiot” there’s a group that will see those words and somehow read “Genius of untold intellect. The author meant to write ‘Eldritch cerebral phantom wielding unfettered power with the lathe of heaven that he invented’ but made a typo and accidentally posted “dumbass baby man’ instead”
- krapp 4y ago>Do people seriously think Musk is this much of a comic book villain? The article doesn't back up its assertion. Has he proven himself to be that petty, spiteful and juvenile? Yes. Time and time again. I don't think he's sabotaging Twitter just for the lulz, I think he's desperately (and ineptly, while seeing himself as Tony Stark playing 5d chess) trying to recoup his losses from a gamble he was forced to take, and having fun trolling the "woke hivemind."
- halayli 4y agoLooks like the author is making a claim and backing it by their opinion instead of facts.