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This isn't surprising, what would be surprising is if NPR blocked inbound referers for Twitter and it had no effect on their traffic. All of NPRs articles presu
by gfodor 3y ago
This isn't surprising, what would be surprising is if NPR blocked inbound referers for Twitter and it had no effect on their traffic. All of NPRs articles presumably get posted into Twitter by someone noteworthy, and that tweet is what goes viral (if any), not the one from their main account.
Now that Musk has recently changed the way unfurls work, I would imagine that definitely affected their traffic.
Doctorow has had a chip on his shoulder about Musk for a while now and I would be happy to go out on a limb predicting that any theories he has about Twitter's demise won't age well. The reason Twitter works is because of network effects, and those network effects are a function of Metcalfe's Law, not the presence or absence of a single account on the platform. Being part of the web, Twitter's network effects are intertwined with the web and their social graph. That's about it. The way to know if Twitter is going down in flames is the degree to which Musk breaks the network effects of the web, or if the exodus from the platform turns into some kind of positive feedback loop. Musk seems much more willing to mess with the former than the latter. (Much of the recent changes are about increasing users and time on site)
- j_maffe 3y agoI think the takeaway isn't that Twitter doesn't cause traffic to webpages, just businesses and journalists having their own accounts not affected said traffic.
- gnicholas 3y agoIf you look at the underlying data, described in the linked NiemanReports article, it shows that Twitter-sourced traffic dropped by over 50%. It's just that NPR's Twitter-sourced traffic only comprised 2% of their total traffic before the change, so getting rid of their account only dropped it by 1% overall (though that was 50% of their total Twitter-sourced traffic). So it might not have made much of an impact for NPR (though no publisher wants to lose 1% of traffic), but for a publisher with more traffic coming from Twitter shouldn't nuke their account, thinking that it won't matter for them either.
- parl_match 3y ago> The reason Twitter works is because of network effects Entire niche and hobbyist communities I'm in have left Twitter almost entirely. Those that still do post content there have seen a huge drop in interaction. Musk has made it a platform with friction, and those with less friction are stepping in.
- gfodor 3y agoTwitter left the phase where niche hobbyist networks matter to the growth of the platform. The site is basically where the mainstream convos happen in the “normie” zeitgeist, and the surrounding din of people yelling at each other about those issues.
- smoldesu 3y agoI mostly disagree with Doctorow's opinions on how platforms die, and I don't really hate Elon as much as I could. I do think Twitter is bound to fall off if it hasn't already, though. The value it provides is too easily copied by others in my opinion, and the actual incentive to participate in it is dwindling. I've never made a Twitter account, and today it has never looked less appealing from the outside-in. Even if the premium features were free! I can believe that certain people are bought-in on Twitter for the long-haul. But social networks are dynamic, and after a while we're going to see the effects of a worse client, less dependable web app and weaker hosting architecture. Even if Elon isn't a destructive force internally (ha ha), the changes have already soured it for a lot of people. Twitter's existence is based on a delicate precipice of advertising and free content. You can't change the deal and expect everyone to be on board going forward. Imagine if Hacker News made the same changes, do you think it's audience would stick around? I certainly wouldn't. Maybe I'm wrong though, I don't really see the inside story.
- gfodor 3y agoMusk recently made a change where the best posters on twitter are earning money now in a ad rev share. They're almost definitely not going anywhere until another social network makes the same offer.
- itronitron 3y ago[flagged]
- gfodor 3y agoI like Bluesky better generally speaking as a platform but I think Twitter basically is unstoppable now that they're paying creators.
- dang 3y ago"Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html