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One Year into Musk, X Monthly Users Are Down 15% and Ad Revenue Has Slumped 54%
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoIt's possible that the end goal for him is to have a political influence and not some kind of direct profit from X(Twitter) as a compan. Then the revenue is not a problem, but the plummeting number of users is.
- viggity 3y agoThe plummeting user base... is that accurate, or is that just a decrease in bots?
- raverbashing 3y agoNo, the bots are clearly up, also the spam Just to share my experience I get mention spam pretty much every day (all with X symbol), or some scam using Elon's face for promoting itself
- natch 3y agoThat hasn't been my experience at all.
- Apocryphon 3y agoTry tweeting about how you like a t-shirt design.
- natch 3y agoHuh? Please share a link, curious what you are talking about.
- plorkyeran 3y agoIf you tweet something along the lines of "I'd buy a tshirt with that image on it" you'll immediately get ten bots offering to sell you that shirt from a print-on-demand site.
- natch 3y agoI’m afraid I don’t believe you. Here is a link to someone doing what you say should immediately attract ten bots: https://x.com/xtlufa/status/1710110358088917405?s=46&t=mWO9fVw20o1MmhhoLVmFpQ https://x.com/xtlufa/status/1710110358088917405?s=46&t=mWO9f... As you can see, zero bots have replied. Unfortunately there are a lot of Elon haters who just make stuff up. I’m not saying you are one of those. But I will say that because of this phenomenon, when you make claims of this sort, if you don’t provide evidence you are likely to be asked for evidence.
- Apocryphon 3y agohttps://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-this-on-a-shirt-bot-bait https://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-this-on-a-shirt-bo... Please also refer to the other reply link
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIf it's that obvious then you should be easily able to link an example tweet as proof?
- Apocryphon 3y agohttps://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yywm/twitters-t-shirt-bots-are-undefeated-and-verified-by-elon-musk https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yywm/twitters-t-shirt-bots... Please also refer to the other reply link
- natch 3y agoSeems that Elon has fixed the problem. One of your links is months old, the other years old.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoYMMV. I have less bots and more followers than before. But the number of interesting exchanges are decreasing.
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoNot sure here, have to trust the sources mentioned on the Internet. I don't know how they count (or do not count) bots.
- trial3 3y agoit definitely feels like it to me - my account is more than 14 years old and looking in my following list recently i lamented how many accounts i enjoyed are have become minimally active or have moved to other platforms like bluesky/mastodon
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAnd they are minimally active on those other platforms too, unfortunately. The community is in a slumber.
- asynchronous 3y ago14% actually sounds really low in my opinion, given how many people said they’d leave.
- fabian2k 3y agoThe alternatives are only slowly taking shape, and the network effects are pretty strong. So I'm not surprised that it is slow, but my impression is that the efforts to move away are getting more serious. It varies by topic, but in some areas I've seen a lot of people on Bluesky now. A large number of them still use Twitter as well for now, I suspect this could change once it becomes clearer whether Bluesky will work out well enough.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoI'm on Bluesky, on substack notes and mastodont. The activity is low, the discussions are boring and the communities are homogeneous. It's nothing like when twitter started. The young us started the energy on twitter, and the old us moved out of it. This means the new services have people with the same opinion, less energy and busy life. It makes for a bland experience. I'm pretty sure the current young crowd is on platforms we are not, innovating, creating their culture, and we are just not there to participate, or even witness it.
- Kinrany 3y agoHow do you know the number of people that said they'd leave?
- mrweasel 3y agoMore people claimed that they wanted to leave than actually left. I've heard a ton of people claim that they'd leave, but then they've decided to stick around for DMs and then just never left and now their back using Twitter/X like nothing happened.
- verdverm 3y agoIt would be better to see engagement numbers. For example, I use it less and uninstalled the app
- qeternity 3y ago> Then the revenue is not a problem Elon is wealthy, but not cash rich. The revenue is absolutely a problem given his financing.
- huhtenberg 3y agoThat was 100% the goal of buying Twitter. Just look at the people he's routinely photographed with in the VIP lounges at various events. He was buying the influence machine, not a business. No doubt about it.
- enos_feedler 3y agoTwitter was stuck in a local maxima. Having lots of "important metrics" trending downward isn't news. The fact that someone took the helm and made the difficult decisions that nobody was willing to do (including the founder!) is pretty big news.
- hobs 3y agoWhat acquisition with a poorly thought out strategy couldn't be defended in this way?
- drakenot 3y agoAh, yes. The difficult decisions to brashly say you will buy a company at an inflated price, attempt to weasel out of the sale after later regretting it, only to be forced by a judge to go through with it. To push Russian propaganda, to threaten to blackmail advertisers by removing their verified status if they don't spend more money, to utterly destroy tens of billions of dollars in valuation in mere months. Not to mention the renaming of a company that had achieved a household name status that many marketers could only dream of, etc. I'm sure glad someone had to step in and make all these tough decisions.
- wlesieutre 3y agoNot just the company name, “tweet” was a household verb and noun. What do you do now on X? Post? I can post anywhere, I’ve been posting in other places for decades. There was just one place to tweet, it boggles my mind that they tossed that aside.
- enos_feedler 3y agoWhen the shape of the hole changes, people still try to fit the same peg inside of it. I'm not sure why. People resist change I guess. Twitter is dead. Elon bought the scraps to short cut early network effective that is impossible to do otherwise. This was the price of admission to a game he is playing against zuck and friends. In 5 years, people won't be asking what do you call a tweet now? Tweets won't even matter. Most people tweet into a black hole. This purchase was about a starting point for a new platform that has more in common with chinese super apps than it does with anything else in the US mobile app market, including the former twitter.
- montroser 3y agoThe sooner we get away from the delusion that "twitter is basically a public service," the better. This timult has been good for people to internalize that it's a private, for-profit company, whose leadership can change, whose moral compass is up for grabs. Not the right venue for official communications from governments and institutions, let alone you or me...
- asynchronous 3y agoThis and Facebook. The way Americans + the rest of the world treat it, you’d think it was a public utility.
- whalesalad 3y agoAmericans + the world = the world?
- asynchronous 3y agoEdit for clarity
- krustyburger 3y agohttps://morbotron.com/caption/S02E07/121811 https://morbotron.com/caption/S02E07/121811
- dudul 3y agoAre Americans not part of the world? Edit: the parent used to read "Americans and the world". Ergo, my comment. The edit is as silly: "Americans and the rest of the world", why not say "the world" then?
- elcritch 3y agoSometimes it feels like that here.
- whalesalad 3y ago
- bitshiftfaced 3y agoHow many monthly users would we expect to drop due to the efforts against bots and webscraping, if we hold real demand constant?
- jeffbee 3y agoImagine believing that X has made efforts against bots. Every day I get hundreds of necro-likes on ancient tweets from zero-follower accounts with profile pics of almost-naked women. The bot problem is way worse than it ever was before Musk.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoIt's the opposite for me. I have less bots in me feed. I do have the same like problem you do, but it's a less of an issue for me than having a stream polluted with empty tweets, crypto scams and political robots.
- fastball 3y agoYes, agreed. I don't really care about the odd like from a fake thot account, and I see way less of other botting.
- mg 3y agoI dislike what Musk has done to Twitter so far. It feels closed, greedy and messy. But in fairness, one has to say that after building a $650B company (Tesla) and a $150B company (Space X), it is not necessarily a sign of business failure when one buys a $44B company they want to restructure and cut revenues in half in the process. Like when you have built a 65 floor skyscraper and buy a 4 floor house as the base for your next project. You wouldn't probably be that scared to take off 2 of the floors if your plan is to reshape it into the next skyscraper.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI wouldn’t ask a world class surgeon to defend me in criminal court. Self awareness about domain expertise is crucial. Otherwise, your Dunning-Krugering your way to value destruction. “I am brilliant and will succeed at anything” runs into a wall when your acumen in a specific domain and a string of luck hits the wall. Twitter was not an engineering problem to be solved when purchased, for example. Which makes sense! It was a social network, and driven by the whims of the system of humans using it. Does Elon know people? Enough to sell Teslas, but not enough to protect or grow the value of a social network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- renewiltord 3y agoThat's what everyone said about Tesla and SpaceX. Software guy trying to make hardware. The established guys were going to eat him alive.
- vlovich123 3y agoHow much time does Musk get with Twitter? Or as long as he owns it we keep up this line of reasoning?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoBlind Elon faithers are unshakable. Figure out what it would take to boycott the last of the advertisers on Twitter still providing revenue and put it out of its misery. It will live on as a Wikipedia page as a cautionary tale around going public, lack of corporate governance, and the whims of the ultra wealthy and their outcomes on the rest of us.
- marcosdumay 3y agoI guess I'll never not read "X" as an unknown value that should be filled-in by the reader. That headline is quite confusing, and by no fault of the writer.
- gormandizer 3y agoWould be nice if an unofficial, unambiguous term caught on, 'twitteX' or 'twiXer' or ???.
- catlover76 3y agoThere already is one: Twitter
- timbit42 3y agoMany have been using Xitter for months, with the 'X' pronounced as 'sh'.
- happytoexplain 3y agoIf we're going for unofficial and unambiguous, there's always... Twitter.
- nextworddev 3y agoTheir costs are also down 60%+ so their cashflow's probably a lot better now, but that's not what really matters to Elon.
- hankchinaski 3y agoMusk has a track record of proving skeptics and commentators alike wrong. With Tesla and spacex. Now one should assume the same with twitter. Even if my experience with the platform has made me move further away from it. Maybe it will be a totally different thing in a couple of years. Time will tell. Edit: I made a pretty unbiased and rational comment. But I can see how many people are biased and despise musk for some reason or the other. I do not have any bias or baked interest. I’m just stating facts as I see them
- katbyte 3y agoThere is an argument to be made Tesla and spacex successes to date are despite him
- DustinBrett 3y agoMake it then...
- vlovich123 3y agoThey’re also in very different “legacy” manufacturing industries that hadn’t been disrupted in a while, not in consumer facing software. PayPal was his last foray in that.
- maxlin 3y agoThere's also an argument to be made that humans can live on photons alone. Didn't turn out well.
- whoknowsidont 3y agoHe literally tried to back out of buying it. Tesla and SpaceX are successes because of government programs and legitimately competent leadership outside of Musk. Twitter has neither of those things.
- maxlin 3y agoThe most innovative and bold tech companies in the last 20 years are successes because of Government programs? Rofl.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoThis is a political post. Tell me more about threads and mastodon. Next year; you’re still going to be talking about twitter. That’s fine. But please stop pretending it’s not political and these are all attacks on facts and merit.
- remram 3y ago-54% in revenue is major tech news. The only thing "political" about it is that some people don't want to hear it.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoElon has actually tried to do some good things for Twitter, like maintaining free speech, for which he has been largely castigated by the liberal media and avoided by advertisers, who hate "controversy".
- systemvoltage 3y agoI remember last year’s zeitgeist that after 75% of the people are fired, Twitter will stop working. It works even better now. And they’ve added lots of features. Not a fan of the new branding, but I prefer free speech and community notes over opacity of previous Twitter admin.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoI quite like the "spaces" feature, can't remember if that was under Elon, but it's a pretty great way to hear some people speak and discuss things.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAs much as I want this to be true, he did censor links to substack. That's not free speech. That's just censoring other things.
- fredoliveira 3y agoNot just substack. He deliberately instructed the team to delay links out to multiple specific websites. People keep saying he is some bastion of free speech, when talking about a guy who literally fires people who contradict him, bans people he dislikes, and downright disconnects his platform from the rest of the online discourse.
- bmy78 3y agoLord no I am not putting my financial information on that cesspool of a platform.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoThat's my issue with it. I think Musk drastic method could bring interesting changes to twitter. But building wechat is not my idea of a better world. Cashless societies are one step away from diving into dystopian nightmares. And a centralized chat and payment system is just way too much power in one spot for the gov not to abuse it.
- suzzer99 3y agoThe worst thing Elon has done to Twitter imo is elevate the paid blue checks to the top of the comment stream. The replies usually had the best information, and were my favorite part of the site. Now I have to scroll past dozens or hundreds of nonsense replies to get to anything good. And for that reason good commenters don't bother much anymore. Although maybe I should thank him, because my time on Twitter has gone basically to zero, and my overall mood and productivity have gone up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- maxlin 3y agoAmong one of the other aspects, one of the quite hopeful posts I've seen on X was from X engineering: - Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a decrease 90% reduction in lines of code from 700K to 70K, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint, and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request. Among a ton of other improvements. Obviously the company is now more tech-focused. And shedding its old skin (not users the way people are saying, 15% goes literally inside random year-to-year deviation). X/Twitter has proven that it can endure Freedom. One thing I'm sure is that the sale has shifted us off one very bad timeline.
- constantly 3y agoSorry but Elon is probably in the top millionth of a percentile in brainpower alone. He will likely single-handedly bring humanity out of the dark ages and into the interstellar space. Articles like this are just trying to be relevant by glomming onto Elon’s name and we shouldn’t give them our attention. As such, I have flagged this article and will flag any articles that paint Elon in a bad light. Go have your fun with someone else who isn’t saving humanity. Once you all learn to behave yourselves I will remove the flag.
- almost_usual 3y ago[flagged]
- constantly 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- almost_usual 3y agoYou’re right, I haven’t brushed up on the guidelines and my comment was pithy. I did notice however there are no official guidelines for flagging. I will reach out to HN to see if they can update this. I did find one relevant comment by dang. > The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post flamewar comments or troll. We ban accounts that do those things because they destroy what the site is supposed to be for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mk89 3y agoI don't know how Twitter really was 5-10 years ago, and I was mostly on technical topics anyways - only recently I started to be more interested in getting "news" from there. Gosh, the amount of fake news and hate speech is freaking insane. It's worse than being at the stadium. Every tweet I read I had to Google or research for authenticity, until I found a few profiles more reliable - however this doesn't prevent fake news/hateful comments in the tweets. Needless to say, I deleted my account when I realized that Elon has a political agenda. Bah. Next. EDIT: I only feel like saying: poor newer generations. They will need a critical thinking like never before.
- yoav 3y agoTo be fair he achieved this within days of taking over. Saying it took a year is kind of downplaying how impactful he’s been.
- almost_usual 3y ago[flagged]
- rsynnott 3y ago[flagged]
- the_third_wave 3y agoAd revenue went down because of boycott calls by dissatisfied Twitter-users who could not handle the opening of the Overton window. To many that open window was a breath of fresh air but to them it carried in the stench of different ideas which had formerly been filtered out. Many of them made a great show of claiming to leave Twitter and some of them left - they're part of that 15%. Twitter is still not my thing because I dislike the format which I see as a textual forerunner of the likes of TikTok but it got more palatable after Musk brought in the kitchen sink and started throwing out the old censorious guard.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWill X sell political ads The highest and best use for a computer network