Twitter Is Losing Its Most Active Users, Internal Documents Show

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2022-10-25/exclusive-where-did-the-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-documents

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

33 17 4 years ago

usnews.com

groffee• 4 years ago

A "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.

On any other platform that's basically just lurking.

animitronix3• 4 years ago

I was WAY more active than this, but after being kicked off the platform for the third time I finally realized they don't deserve my presence. Their loss.

Finnucane• 4 years ago

They miss you.

yurtly• 4 years ago

What were you booted for?

rideontime• 4 years ago

Your account is pretty new, how many times have you been kicked off HN?

tharne• 4 years ago

That's because Twitter is not a real place.

droptablemain• 4 years ago

They have gone too far down the road with excessive bans. Maybe that will change soon.

ivraatiems2• 4 years ago

"not safe for work" (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users, the report found.

This helps clarify it, especially the bit about NSFW content. Twitter is essentially going the way of any other poorly moderated public space: It is becoming a haven for the types of content that it allows that other spaces don't. You absolutely can't post NSFW content on Instagram or TikTok; even a hint of it can get you banned (though it's always a roll of the dice) and people who produce NSFW content but have totally SFW Instagrams still get banned all the time for just mentioning their job exists.

I wonder what percentage is hardcore left or right politics as well, as in, the kind of stuff that's inflammatory enough that only people you agree with engage with you on it. That's the other big thing I associate Twitter with: hot takes about politics from the most unreasonably radical people imaginable.

The problem is that as communities of people that the majority of humans don't want to engage with grow in size on a platform, the number of "normal" folks decreases. Unless Twitter gets its act together and starts enacting consistent, clear, predictable moderation, this is just gonna get worse.

(Note: I am not saying sex work or adult/NSFW tweeters should be moderated away. I am just saying that they are on the platform because other platforms won't have them, not because they like the platform or would choose it if everything else were equal, and that Twitter's interests are adverse to theirs.)

saurik• 4 years ago

Do you really feel like the people posting NSFW are somehow chasing people off of Twitter? I 100% know they exist, but when I scroll through my feed on Twitter I don't see any of it, so I don't understand how it could possibly bother me...

I think the better theory is that small snippets of text was always a dumb format for these key oft-visual interests of news and fashion, and thereby the entire platform only made sense for a short period of time while there weren't high quality channels to share images and video, which Twitter supports (as they couldn't NOT) but really sucks at in comparison to Instagram and TikTok.

(I feel a need to point out the obvious here, just in case, though I hope no one finds this confusing: the NSFW people are also going to clearly be heavily interested in photos and video, but they are simply banned from the other platforms and so put up with Twitter's horrible media sharing capabilities as they have no other choice.)

ivraatiems2• 4 years ago

It's not the mere fact of their existence that would drive people away, necessarily. It's that as other high-activity users leave, your recommendations are either gonna end up being NSFW... or empty. At that point, if NSFW isn't what you want, you'll find it distasteful and leave.

It's probably a mild effect right now, maybe not even observable if your Twitter account is already well-established. But as Twitter continues to lose members, it will become more pronounced.

b34r• 4 years ago

No one I care about has left that I can discern.

aamoscodes• 4 years ago

Interesting to get data on this. People that use Twitter frequently take breaks, come back, and only tweet about how great life was without Twitter. I also think some function of this is in follower count. It's fun to have ~500 followers, somewhere around 5,000 is when your tweets start circulating to people outside your normal sphere of influence and the replies get annoying.

Restricting replies to mentioned users doesn't stop quote tweets, which doesn't stop your tweet from reaching even more annoying, more unrelated communities.

lawgimenez• 4 years ago

I'm a Twitter user since 2010 and lately for the past few years I hate it so much. It is becoming like LinkedIn with all the bullshit tweets like "here's how to improve your life" thread. Or "learn \(language) in two weeks here's how" thread.

runnr_az• 4 years ago

Everybody dunking on each other… maybe not the best way to communicate

jhobag• 4 years ago

As most internet natives know, the longer a thread goes on the more likely a flamewar erupts; pour gasoline on that with the addition of clout/followers/engagement to grow a brand, and you get an especially unhealthy reward loop

Twitter Is Losing Its Most Active Users, Internal Documents Show

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