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Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have st

Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.

thih9 4y ago
> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
aftbit 4y ago
I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  I need a dummies guide to mastodon. Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
  - gpm 4y ago
    To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version. The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      ok! Thank you! I will of course spend the time to learn more as well but that was very helpful.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Basically Mastodon is a bunch of different social networks, but you can follow/subscribe people who are using any of them. If you want your own server, you need to leave it on somewhere for it to pull messages from other people and push yours out. Otherwise, you can just pick a server and set up an account on it. Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.
organsnyder 4y ago
I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
- muglug 4y ago
  Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox. Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
  - mustacheemperor 4y ago
    I just never read twitter links anymore because when I follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who used to link interesting content on twitter are now being linked via their mastodon handle instead.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    > And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%. I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally. I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
- seanw444 4y ago
Xeoncross 4y ago
I think the underestimated fact is that Twitter has market share for people who matter. I don't believe the 'Twitter is dead' sentiment. It's where I go for access to global establishment personal. The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks, etc... I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for world business.
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  Platform shifts don’t happen overnight. A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
  - marban 4y ago
    Twitter 2010 was already a global party.
    - depereo 4y ago
      And so is Mastodon, now.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two different things. A lot of people still check Twitter every day because train wrecks are interesting.
      - raydev 4y ago
        Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance, so I can't just click to follow the person or return to my feed by clicking. And that is only one example of how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.
gdulli 4y ago
I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long daily habit. Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable. Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach critical mass. Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    2035 is a long way away. If you’d told someone in 13 years ago that in 2022 a decentralised social network started making headway, they’d probably have guessed it was RSS-based. I definitely wouldn’t bet on ActivityPub being The Thing in another 13 years.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run. Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained. That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and the service becomes unprofitable to run.
pfisherman 4y ago
I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.
  - mkmk 4y ago
    The 'mute' function is wonderful for opting out of certain communities
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      I suppose I'm really looking for a more fine-grained way to filter certain topics from certain users without ignoring them entirely.
      - ryanjshaw 4y ago
        I've thought about building a ChatGPT-based Twitter interface for this but... ironically, Twitter API is dead.
      - suddenclarity 4y ago
emodendroket 4y ago
Is he right or not and for how long is the big question, but I agree that is thinking that's animating him, to the extent there is a plan.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Makes sense to me. A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together. There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done. A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
- jabradoodle 4y ago
  Advertisers might care when they can't show you adverts. People commenting on current affairs might when they can't comment on events. Sports fans, etc. Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability of the site.
MangezBien 4y ago
I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of any principled objection just because how much crap I had to sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly increased.
olalonde 4y ago
My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's users have dropped significantly" according to a report by Wire[1]. Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-us-data-growth-tweet-bankruptcy-shutting-down-rcna59051 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-... [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
- deleted 4y ago
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- michaelmrose 4y ago
  App downloads have grown, which is the most useless metric because banning or breaking third-party clients can drive downloads, as can new phones. Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not growing .
- lenkite 4y ago
  Upvoted. There is a significant HN backlash against Twitter - where any data even remotely positive for Twitter or even mentioning the stuff in the Twitter files that contradict known "facts" about Twitter's previous "fairness" will get you downvoted by the dozen.
coldpie 4y ago
I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change things up now and then anyway.
- mikrotikker 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gtr 4y ago
    antifa are in no way terrorists, get a grip.
    - mikrotikker 4y ago
      [flagged]
madeofpalk 4y ago
A significant chunk of the people I followed on twitter left. So I left and followed them on Mastodon.
awb 4y ago
I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time), buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting political content like how to vote in an election was the nail in the coffin for me. I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
- renlo 4y ago
  If Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
  - darkwraithcov 4y ago
    Capitalism is a farce and a complete house of cards. Remember when we realized during the pandemic that the most important people in society were grocery store clerks and gas station attendants? We learned nothing from that. Broken system.
  - awb 4y ago
    The same goes for any billionaire with investments, which is pretty much all of them I’d imagine. And those assets even if they’re not all disposable at the market price can be used as collateral without liquidating them. So I think it’s still fair to say that Musk, etc. still have the greatest personal financial leverage available to them in the world.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      People also always ignore the whole "Controls giant corporations" thing. You have significant leeway to direct companies you control into things you want without falling foul of regulations. Consider Musk bringing in Tesla software developers to Twitter. Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist
rsynnott 4y ago
It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a twitter account because, damnit, I’ve had it since 2007, back when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures, and I don’t want someone to squat it; everything changes and twitter may once more have competent leadership. But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly. Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have someone to not take your username. I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
AlexandrB 4y ago
I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in since Tweetbot stopped working.
thepasswordis 4y ago
I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there, and have come back to twitter. A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
tric 4y ago
It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were a regular tweet without context. I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed. Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
mkehrt 4y ago
Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved to mastodon or just stopped posting.
JohnClark1337 4y ago
[dead]
somsak2 4y ago
Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of a change and more of a return to those early days. The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32 https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
- bfeynman 4y ago
  There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked) Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
- philistine 4y ago
  Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter account since the culling started. That's a silent failure that led to a lot of tech people leaving.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists feature for following news. See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
throwaway290 4y ago
I'm following less than 2 hundred and I have seen my number of followed people dwindle a dozen or so. Some of them really good
Hamuko 4y ago
Haven't fully left but my Twitter usage has dropped by like 90%. And often that is just when I don't have anything better to do. Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead. Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean, back when it first became a thing it was down frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway. Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.
ben174 4y ago
Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they continued to grow. I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
>> I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up. Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more. The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers. All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day. If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
LightBug1 4y ago
I left 2 months ago. Best thing I did this year so far.
hagbarth 4y ago
I stopped using it. It just doesn't draw me in anymore.
zzzeek 4y ago
he still has to figure out some way to make money and apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this out https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-paying-for-their-employees-to-get-twitter-blue-badges/ https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...
iFred 4y ago
Things started to get pretty bad on 2/24 where a lot of the backend stuff used to serve media started to get slower. https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857 https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857
- raydev 4y ago
  None of this really has any impact because of social stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages preventing people performing basic actions, like reading their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.
raydev 4y ago
It's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of the normie population barely registered it. It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
jabradoodle 4y ago
Most users probably won't jump ship with some minor downtime for a site the size of twitter. The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively abondoned. Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of downtime per year, they would never have had that.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
>Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
pessimizer 4y ago
My favorite part is when everybody pretends like the (rails) Twitter uptime of a decade ago wasn't more like 95%.
entaloneralie 4y ago
I entirely left twitter, and 15k+ followers account, when they deprecated the html version and never went back. It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
porknubbins 4y ago
You may be right but it sets a terrible precedent if anyone other than social media tries this. If your probability of a service working is only 99% the probability of an overall failure is .99 to the power of the number of services you depend on, which could be a lot.
michelb 4y ago
Just checked in again after 2 months and noticed that roughly half of the people I follow have reduced posting or stopped posting altogether. I'm also not seeing a lot of posts from people that I follow until I go to their profile page. My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.

thih9 4y ago

> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.

aftbit 4y ago

I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.

jamiek88 4y ago
I need a dummies guide to mastodon. Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
- gpm 4y ago
  To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version. The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    ok! Thank you! I will of course spend the time to learn more as well but that was very helpful.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Basically Mastodon is a bunch of different social networks, but you can follow/subscribe people who are using any of them. If you want your own server, you need to leave it on somewhere for it to pull messages from other people and push yours out. Otherwise, you can just pick a server and set up an account on it. Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.

organsnyder 4y ago

I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.

muglug 4y ago
Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox. Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  I just never read twitter links anymore because when I follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who used to link interesting content on twitter are now being linked via their mastodon handle instead.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  > And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%. I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally. I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
seanw444 4y ago

Xeoncross 4y ago

I think the underestimated fact is that Twitter has market share for people who matter. I don't believe the 'Twitter is dead' sentiment. It's where I go for access to global establishment personal. The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks, etc... I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for world business.

Eric_WVGG 4y ago
Platform shifts don’t happen overnight. A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
- marban 4y ago
  Twitter 2010 was already a global party.
  - depereo 4y ago
    And so is Mastodon, now.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two different things. A lot of people still check Twitter every day because train wrecks are interesting.
    - raydev 4y ago
      Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance, so I can't just click to follow the person or return to my feed by clicking. And that is only one example of how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.

gdulli 4y ago

I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long daily habit. Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable. Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach critical mass. Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  2035 is a long way away. If you’d told someone in 13 years ago that in 2022 a decentralised social network started making headway, they’d probably have guessed it was RSS-based. I definitely wouldn’t bet on ActivityPub being The Thing in another 13 years.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run. Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained. That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and the service becomes unprofitable to run.

pfisherman 4y ago

I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.

emodendroket 4y ago
I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.
- mkmk 4y ago
  The 'mute' function is wonderful for opting out of certain communities
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I suppose I'm really looking for a more fine-grained way to filter certain topics from certain users without ignoring them entirely.
    - ryanjshaw 4y ago
      I've thought about building a ChatGPT-based Twitter interface for this but... ironically, Twitter API is dead.
    - suddenclarity 4y ago

emodendroket 4y ago

Is he right or not and for how long is the big question, but I agree that is thinking that's animating him, to the extent there is a plan.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

Makes sense to me. A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together. There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done. A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.

jabradoodle 4y ago
Advertisers might care when they can't show you adverts. People commenting on current affairs might when they can't comment on events. Sports fans, etc. Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability of the site.

MangezBien 4y ago

I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of any principled objection just because how much crap I had to sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly increased.

olalonde 4y ago

My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's users have dropped significantly" according to a report by Wire[1]. Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-us-data-growth-tweet-bankruptcy-shutting-down-rcna59051 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-... [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...

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michaelmrose 4y ago
App downloads have grown, which is the most useless metric because banning or breaking third-party clients can drive downloads, as can new phones. Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not growing .
lenkite 4y ago
Upvoted. There is a significant HN backlash against Twitter - where any data even remotely positive for Twitter or even mentioning the stuff in the Twitter files that contradict known "facts" about Twitter's previous "fairness" will get you downvoted by the dozen.

coldpie 4y ago

I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change things up now and then anyway.

mikrotikker 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- gtr 4y ago
  antifa are in no way terrorists, get a grip.
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    [flagged]

madeofpalk 4y ago

A significant chunk of the people I followed on twitter left. So I left and followed them on Mastodon.

awb 4y ago

I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time), buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting political content like how to vote in an election was the nail in the coffin for me. I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.

renlo 4y ago
If Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
- darkwraithcov 4y ago
  Capitalism is a farce and a complete house of cards. Remember when we realized during the pandemic that the most important people in society were grocery store clerks and gas station attendants? We learned nothing from that. Broken system.
- awb 4y ago
  The same goes for any billionaire with investments, which is pretty much all of them I’d imagine. And those assets even if they’re not all disposable at the market price can be used as collateral without liquidating them. So I think it’s still fair to say that Musk, etc. still have the greatest personal financial leverage available to them in the world.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    People also always ignore the whole "Controls giant corporations" thing. You have significant leeway to direct companies you control into things you want without falling foul of regulations. Consider Musk bringing in Tesla software developers to Twitter. Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist

rsynnott 4y ago

It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a twitter account because, damnit, I’ve had it since 2007, back when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures, and I don’t want someone to squat it; everything changes and twitter may once more have competent leadership. But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly. Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.

madeofpalk 4y ago
You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have someone to not take your username. I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.

AlexandrB 4y ago

I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in since Tweetbot stopped working.

thepasswordis 4y ago

I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there, and have come back to twitter. A few people seem to have just logged off completely.

tric 4y ago

It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were a regular tweet without context. I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed. Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.

mkehrt 4y ago

Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved to mastodon or just stopped posting.

JohnClark1337 4y ago

[dead]

somsak2 4y ago

Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of a change and more of a return to those early days. The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32 https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.

bfeynman 4y ago
There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
- deleted 4y ago
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johannes1234321 4y ago
Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked) Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
philistine 4y ago
Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter account since the culling started. That's a silent failure that led to a lot of tech people leaving.

wonderwonder 4y ago

I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists feature for following news. See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.

throwaway290 4y ago

I'm following less than 2 hundred and I have seen my number of followed people dwindle a dozen or so. Some of them really good

Hamuko 4y ago

Haven't fully left but my Twitter usage has dropped by like 90%. And often that is just when I don't have anything better to do. Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead. Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

I mean, back when it first became a thing it was down frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway. Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.

ben174 4y ago

Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they continued to grow. I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

>> I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up. Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more. The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers. All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day. If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.

LightBug1 4y ago

I left 2 months ago. Best thing I did this year so far.

hagbarth 4y ago

I stopped using it. It just doesn't draw me in anymore.

zzzeek 4y ago

he still has to figure out some way to make money and apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this out https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-paying-for-their-employees-to-get-twitter-blue-badges/ https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...

iFred 4y ago

Things started to get pretty bad on 2/24 where a lot of the backend stuff used to serve media started to get slower. https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857 https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857

raydev 4y ago
None of this really has any impact because of social stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages preventing people performing basic actions, like reading their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.

raydev 4y ago

It's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of the normie population barely registered it. It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.

jabradoodle 4y ago

Most users probably won't jump ship with some minor downtime for a site the size of twitter. The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively abondoned. Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of downtime per year, they would never have had that.

VirusNewbie 4y ago

>Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.

pessimizer 4y ago

My favorite part is when everybody pretends like the (rails) Twitter uptime of a decade ago wasn't more like 95%.

entaloneralie 4y ago

I entirely left twitter, and 15k+ followers account, when they deprecated the html version and never went back. It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.

porknubbins 4y ago

You may be right but it sets a terrible precedent if anyone other than social media tries this. If your probability of a service working is only 99% the probability of an overall failure is .99 to the power of the number of services you depend on, which could be a lot.

michelb 4y ago

Just checked in again after 2 months and noticed that roughly half of the people I follow have reduced posting or stopped posting altogether. I'm also not seeing a lot of posts from people that I follow until I go to their profile page. My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.