6 ms·

I wish someone at X would leak data on the current state of the user base. Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandon

by xvxvx 9mo ago

I wish someone at X would leak data on the current state of the user base. Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere. Apparently X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts. Maybe they’re not being shadowbanned or ghosted. There’s just almost no real people using that site.

hnrodey 9mo ago
Vast majority on X are silent observers just scrolling, liking and bookmarking.
- coredev_ 9mo ago
  This is likely true, but that is also true for other platforms. Like Threads that OP shared.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- extraduder_ire 9mo ago
  Since a few years ago, you need an account to view what account without a grey checkmark post. This includes realtime delay information from train companies, and outages/incidents from water companies. I know several people who only have accounts for one or both of these reasons, since that information isn't posted elsewhere or as quickly. Without an account, you either get a single page of random popular tweets from that account or an erroneous message saying they haven't posted anything yet.
lurk2 9mo ago
> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts. I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
nailer 9mo ago
> Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere. Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  >I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want Good luck with that. You didn't really buy it, you're temporarily renting it from Musk. If you stop paying, you'll also lose your username.
  - nailer 9mo ago
    Payment is one time, it doesn’t renew. They won’t sell it unless it’s inactive. It won’t be inactive.
    - threetonesun 9mo ago
      [flagged]
    - HWR_14 9mo ago
      For now. Although I doubt this would happen, they legally could write to you tomorrow demanding $100/mo because they want to.
      - pc86 9mo ago
        Well any company could legally do that at any point so I'm not sure how this is any different.
        HWR_14 9mo ago
        The difference is not the company so much as the conviction of the person I am responding to. Although X has snagged names they want for their own use away from users
reddalo 9mo ago
I also feel like nobody uses Twitter anymore, after Musk bought it. Now it's just random scammers and "tech bros". It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.
- littlestymaar 9mo ago
  It's a “community” thing. Some communities have vanished from Twitter almost entirely (like historians), some have massively increased their presence on bluesky but kept their Twitter presence (ex: the military OSINT crowd) and others didn't move at all (Machine learning people are all on Twitter and nowhere else).
  - big_toast 9mo ago
    Machine learning is slowly happening on bluesky. It would just take one lab defecting. And maybe hosting some better feed algorithm technology.
    - Sammi 9mo ago
      Lots of the best ai content is only on Bluesky now.
      - tpm 9mo ago
        Where? Twitter is increasingly useless/hype only in that regard.
        big_toast 9mo ago
        On bsky, like a few AI/tech things (simonw, dan abramov, jeff dean, ethan mollick etc, and the people in their replies). Then use discover and this 'for you' feed - https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social to find additional things to like. Then follow the people who post what you're liking. (spacecowboy17 is running a feed that looks at your likes and then populates the feed with people who have a similar like cluster to you). Consider adding this anti-ai-ai labeler if you're put off by some people - https://bsky.app/profile/antiantiai.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/antiantiai.bsky.social I think the bsky ML/tech content is relatively thin and people are overstating its volume. But it does exist, and some of it is not posted elsewhere. (Or the posters aren't at least.) I don't know how your twitter is tuned, but I'm overwhelmed by the volume of meaningful twitter ML info. If you turn on swipe to 'not interested in this post' and bookmark/like/click even a few posts (and maybe follow a few AI people), it really becomes a feed of just ML info very quickly. And it's pretty easy to get the engagement bait filtered out this way too.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
Yep I find it hard to believe that real users can tolerate X. It’s FILLED with racists and supremacist content and it is very hard to hide from it. Look at what happened to Vivek Ramaswamy - he had to shut down his account because replies were nearly 100% slurs. If you aren’t aligned with the far right, it’s unusable. The ones saying otherwise are the ones who aren’t targeted by all this because of their demographics, and often, they’re wealthy too. Think VCs and billionaires.
- user34283 9mo ago
  That's absolutely not the case with my "For you" feed. It's mostly photography and tech. Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.
  - immibis 9mo ago
    Can you provide some examples of what you think left extremism is?
    - user34283 9mo ago
      I click /r/pics, and I see a photo of Black Panther protesters holding assault rifles, a pic of Musk and Trump at dinner with the title yapping about the Epstein files, multiple pics protesting ICE and literally labelling them both fascists and Nazis, a photo of Trump's Hollywood star being smeared with "pedophile", some high ranking border patrol officer labelled a "Nazi officer" for wearing a uniform coat, and so on. I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.
      - only-one1701 9mo ago
        You’re telling on yourself here my brother
        9mo ago
divan 9mo ago
> X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. Honest question: how does 561 million active users should feel?
dkarl 9mo ago
I'm not on Twitter, but I know a lot of the content I see comes indirectly from Twitter. For example, for soccer news, I follow a number of fans and journalists on BlueSky, but they follow journalists, agents, and official team and league accounts on Twitter, as well as players and players' wives and girlfriends on Instagram. As much as I'd love for them to die and won't touch them myself, it's clear that a lot of the information I get originates on X and Meta platforms.
numpad0 9mo ago
Apparently: the algorithmic timeline as it's implemented now has a daily pageview budget for each users. Once it's up, it's up, and the system hides the user from timelines. It doesn't matter if the user is followed by someone, or the user's tweets were retweeted. This applies to both Following and Recommended timelines, but so far not to Lists. This is breaking bunch of fundamental things about the system. There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.
raydev 9mo ago
> There’s just almost no real people using that site. It's funny that you're making the same fundamental mistake that Elon made when he tried to get out of buying Twitter.
neonmagenta 9mo ago
For X, it's people and bots using chatgpt grasping for a piece of the payout pie using "reply guy" and engagement bait tactics for sure. There's nothing really happening on there, just a race to see who can rack up the most likes and replies to get a check.

by xvxvx 9mo ago

hnrodey 9mo ago

Vast majority on X are silent observers just scrolling, liking and bookmarking.

coredev_ 9mo ago
This is likely true, but that is also true for other platforms. Like Threads that OP shared.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
extraduder_ire 9mo ago
Since a few years ago, you need an account to view what account without a grey checkmark post. This includes realtime delay information from train companies, and outages/incidents from water companies. I know several people who only have accounts for one or both of these reasons, since that information isn't posted elsewhere or as quickly. Without an account, you either get a single page of random popular tweets from that account or an erroneous message saying they haven't posted anything yet.

lurk2 9mo ago

> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts. I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.

nailer 9mo ago

> Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere. Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.

reddalo 9mo ago
>I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want Good luck with that. You didn't really buy it, you're temporarily renting it from Musk. If you stop paying, you'll also lose your username.
- nailer 9mo ago
  Payment is one time, it doesn’t renew. They won’t sell it unless it’s inactive. It won’t be inactive.
  - threetonesun 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  - HWR_14 9mo ago
    For now. Although I doubt this would happen, they legally could write to you tomorrow demanding $100/mo because they want to.
    - pc86 9mo ago
      Well any company could legally do that at any point so I'm not sure how this is any different.
      - HWR_14 9mo ago
        The difference is not the company so much as the conviction of the person I am responding to. Although X has snagged names they want for their own use away from users

reddalo 9mo ago

I also feel like nobody uses Twitter anymore, after Musk bought it. Now it's just random scammers and "tech bros". It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.

littlestymaar 9mo ago
It's a “community” thing. Some communities have vanished from Twitter almost entirely (like historians), some have massively increased their presence on bluesky but kept their Twitter presence (ex: the military OSINT crowd) and others didn't move at all (Machine learning people are all on Twitter and nowhere else).
- big_toast 9mo ago
  Machine learning is slowly happening on bluesky. It would just take one lab defecting. And maybe hosting some better feed algorithm technology.
  - Sammi 9mo ago
    Lots of the best ai content is only on Bluesky now.
    - tpm 9mo ago
      Where? Twitter is increasingly useless/hype only in that regard.
      - big_toast 9mo ago
        On bsky, like a few AI/tech things (simonw, dan abramov, jeff dean, ethan mollick etc, and the people in their replies). Then use discover and this 'for you' feed - https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social to find additional things to like. Then follow the people who post what you're liking. (spacecowboy17 is running a feed that looks at your likes and then populates the feed with people who have a similar like cluster to you). Consider adding this anti-ai-ai labeler if you're put off by some people - https://bsky.app/profile/antiantiai.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/antiantiai.bsky.social I think the bsky ML/tech content is relatively thin and people are overstating its volume. But it does exist, and some of it is not posted elsewhere. (Or the posters aren't at least.) I don't know how your twitter is tuned, but I'm overwhelmed by the volume of meaningful twitter ML info. If you turn on swipe to 'not interested in this post' and bookmark/like/click even a few posts (and maybe follow a few AI people), it really becomes a feed of just ML info very quickly. And it's pretty easy to get the engagement bait filtered out this way too.

SilverElfin 9mo ago

Yep I find it hard to believe that real users can tolerate X. It’s FILLED with racists and supremacist content and it is very hard to hide from it. Look at what happened to Vivek Ramaswamy - he had to shut down his account because replies were nearly 100% slurs. If you aren’t aligned with the far right, it’s unusable. The ones saying otherwise are the ones who aren’t targeted by all this because of their demographics, and often, they’re wealthy too. Think VCs and billionaires.

user34283 9mo ago
That's absolutely not the case with my "For you" feed. It's mostly photography and tech. Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.
- immibis 9mo ago
  Can you provide some examples of what you think left extremism is?
  - user34283 9mo ago
    I click /r/pics, and I see a photo of Black Panther protesters holding assault rifles, a pic of Musk and Trump at dinner with the title yapping about the Epstein files, multiple pics protesting ICE and literally labelling them both fascists and Nazis, a photo of Trump's Hollywood star being smeared with "pedophile", some high ranking border patrol officer labelled a "Nazi officer" for wearing a uniform coat, and so on. I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.
    - only-one1701 9mo ago
      You’re telling on yourself here my brother
      - 9mo ago

divan 9mo ago

> X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. Honest question: how does 561 million active users should feel?

dkarl 9mo ago

I'm not on Twitter, but I know a lot of the content I see comes indirectly from Twitter. For example, for soccer news, I follow a number of fans and journalists on BlueSky, but they follow journalists, agents, and official team and league accounts on Twitter, as well as players and players' wives and girlfriends on Instagram. As much as I'd love for them to die and won't touch them myself, it's clear that a lot of the information I get originates on X and Meta platforms.

numpad0 9mo ago

Apparently: the algorithmic timeline as it's implemented now has a daily pageview budget for each users. Once it's up, it's up, and the system hides the user from timelines. It doesn't matter if the user is followed by someone, or the user's tweets were retweeted. This applies to both Following and Recommended timelines, but so far not to Lists. This is breaking bunch of fundamental things about the system. There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.

raydev 9mo ago

> There’s just almost no real people using that site. It's funny that you're making the same fundamental mistake that Elon made when he tried to get out of buying Twitter.

neonmagenta 9mo ago

For X, it's people and bots using chatgpt grasping for a piece of the payout pie using "reply guy" and engagement bait tactics for sure. There's nothing really happening on there, just a race to see who can rack up the most likes and replies to get a check.