4 ms·

Fewer people are using Elon Musk's X, according to analysts

16 points by hotdailys 3y ago

infotainment 3y ago
But you see, if you instead measure using [random newly-defined metric], it appears that the numbers are higher than ever before! Checkmate, haters!
baranul 3y ago
But it appears that Elon and supporters don't care. They have their bubble and they are happy. It's a matter of who and how many are willing to pay for the bubble.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  That math has been done. Unless Elon gets wildly higher subscription rates than any other social media, and much faster, subscriptions will not save Xitter.
justforasingle 3y ago
I started an X account recently and the posts they put into my feed were the most intensely negative tweets and imagery I've ever seen interspersed with sports shit I also could not block. It didn't matter how many times I tried to block a certain kind of content another account posting the exact same thing would be in the feed. I didn't want to see basketball, Hitlerism, political tweets or Gaza gore yet that is all I was shown. I deactivated my account and checked out mastodon instead and the signup screen for that was blatantly censorious and would be like using twitter with annoying leftists instead. Where the hell do normal people hang out online to have a chat? Imagining the kind of stuff swirling around the average twitter/mastodon users head is unreal. There must be radicalism beyond measure just beneath the surface ready to blow for every sort of group all across the world.
- krapp 3y ago
  There is no "signup screen" for "Mastodon." It isn't a centralized platform like Twitter. You choose to follow specific instances or people - and normal people have political views (such as all of the politics in your comment, here.) If you don't want politics, don't follow politics, simple as. Unlike with Twitter, blocking actually works in the fediverse. But honestly, if seeing one signup form was all it took to send you on a tilt about censorship and radical leftists? Stay on Twitter.
  - justforasingle 3y ago
    This is what I was referring to in regards to a signup: https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up By the way I would hardly characterise myself as being 'on a tilt' in my post, I simply stated that mastodon was x.com but for the other side. Perhaps you are on a tilt and anyone level-headed appears as tilted?
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      I wonder if there's an AI product/startup idea here. A personal AI firewall that aggressively curates social media content and only shows you content that benefits you (posts that are information dense, curious, and not angry), instead of benefiting the corporation or benefiting someone's ideological agenda by keeping you doomscrolling. Anyways, I've been moderately happy with Bluesky. It's got an obvious left-bias (probably just due to a flight of left-leaning people from X), but it doesn't have racism, gore, porn, so I don't go away feeling down like I do after using X.
    - infotainment 3y ago
      I think this shows you just fundamentally misunderstood how Mastodon works. (Which, admittedly, is pretty common, since the onboarding is terrible.) Those rules are all for mastodon.social, which is a specific server running the Mastodon Twitter-Like software. There exist countless other servers with their own sets of rules (one of which may be more to your liking) that you could join. No matter which server you join, you can generally interact (follow, reply, etc) with people on other servers.

16 points by hotdailys 3y ago

But you see, if you instead measure using [random newly-defined metric], it appears that the numbers are higher than ever before! Checkmate, haters!

baranul 3y ago

But it appears that Elon and supporters don't care. They have their bubble and they are happy. It's a matter of who and how many are willing to pay for the bubble.

Zigurd 3y ago
That math has been done. Unless Elon gets wildly higher subscription rates than any other social media, and much faster, subscriptions will not save Xitter.

justforasingle 3y ago

I started an X account recently and the posts they put into my feed were the most intensely negative tweets and imagery I've ever seen interspersed with sports shit I also could not block. It didn't matter how many times I tried to block a certain kind of content another account posting the exact same thing would be in the feed. I didn't want to see basketball, Hitlerism, political tweets or Gaza gore yet that is all I was shown. I deactivated my account and checked out mastodon instead and the signup screen for that was blatantly censorious and would be like using twitter with annoying leftists instead. Where the hell do normal people hang out online to have a chat? Imagining the kind of stuff swirling around the average twitter/mastodon users head is unreal. There must be radicalism beyond measure just beneath the surface ready to blow for every sort of group all across the world.

krapp 3y ago
There is no "signup screen" for "Mastodon." It isn't a centralized platform like Twitter. You choose to follow specific instances or people - and normal people have political views (such as all of the politics in your comment, here.) If you don't want politics, don't follow politics, simple as. Unlike with Twitter, blocking actually works in the fediverse. But honestly, if seeing one signup form was all it took to send you on a tilt about censorship and radical leftists? Stay on Twitter.
- justforasingle 3y ago
  This is what I was referring to in regards to a signup: https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up By the way I would hardly characterise myself as being 'on a tilt' in my post, I simply stated that mastodon was x.com but for the other side. Perhaps you are on a tilt and anyone level-headed appears as tilted?
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    I wonder if there's an AI product/startup idea here. A personal AI firewall that aggressively curates social media content and only shows you content that benefits you (posts that are information dense, curious, and not angry), instead of benefiting the corporation or benefiting someone's ideological agenda by keeping you doomscrolling. Anyways, I've been moderately happy with Bluesky. It's got an obvious left-bias (probably just due to a flight of left-leaning people from X), but it doesn't have racism, gore, porn, so I don't go away feeling down like I do after using X.
  - infotainment 3y ago
    I think this shows you just fundamentally misunderstood how Mastodon works. (Which, admittedly, is pretty common, since the onboarding is terrible.) Those rules are all for mastodon.social, which is a specific server running the Mastodon Twitter-Like software. There exist countless other servers with their own sets of rules (one of which may be more to your liking) that you could join. No matter which server you join, you can generally interact (follow, reply, etc) with people on other servers.