Twitter / X is losing daily active users. CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-drop-under-elon-musk

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

75 98 3 years ago

sysadm1n• 3 years ago

Twitter is unusable these days. They've done chaos engineering without even trying to. So many bugs, despite people saying it's 'stable' and 'working properly'. I'm not going to list the bugs out here, there's too many. And I'm prompted to prove I'm a human every 10 minutes because I'm apparently not acting like a human. So I star a lot of things and I'm a loudmouth. So what?

api• 3 years ago

For a long time I’ve tried to keep it a little usable by blocking any and all rage bait / culture war troll spam, but it’s become impossible. Valuable content is increasingly lost in a sea of trolls trying to make you angry about something.

I really wish the interesting accounts I still like to follow, which mostly are tech related, would go to Mastodon or Bluesky or anything else.

palmfacehn• 3 years ago

I've always had the impression that Twitter was a place people go to be spicy and flippant. The character limits incentivized this kind of behavior. It was never a place I expected to have an in-depth discussion or long form reads. For me it is still useful for marketing, giveaways and to have a glimpse into popular sentiment.

Krasnol• 3 years ago

The moment they turned off tweetdeck for normal users and wanted money for it, was the final straw for me.

I was never able to use Twitter over the main page, and I don't understand how people can with their hundreds of followers. Especially with the Ads mixed in between. Utterly useless for me.

FYI: Mastodon has a similar tool: https://mastodeck.com/ It works perfectly.

coolbreezetft22• 3 years ago

Haven't been on it since the day it began blocking logged-out viewing

thefurdrake• 3 years ago

Eh, those are probably just bots it's losing! This is clearly evidence that these policies are working./s

rgbrenner• 3 years ago

I suspect this article was inspired by this more interesting and detailed article from techdirt a week ago:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/22/elon-may-have-accidental...

garba_dlm• 3 years ago

because twitter's real purpose is to manipulate its users and the issue is how this is more obviously the case now than before

it used to be more important that users remained engaged, which in twitter meant people got to interact between themselves as number one priority.

but now, the main priority is to manipulate opinion more directly, so users interacting among themselves is no longer the first thing you're served.

I guess i'm trying to point out how twitter changed into subtly manipulating its users as the main thing; before they would only intervene directly to avoid witch hunts and things like that.

but now (with Musk) they're after money to be made by directing popular opinion, but they're noobs at this (FB/instagram are the real masters for now). This makes enough MORE money that advertisers become less relevant; and even user engagement suffers a little.

this gets to constitutional levels of danger when they intervene personal communication. But the internet has been doing this a lot nowadays; I have direct experience with reddit (shadow)blocking me from interacting with other users deep within nested comments in controversial threads; they're stiffing human-to-human conversation and pretending they don't do it; but this is just blocking... unleash the bots to really drive people's thoughts towards intended places... lest people do it on their own freewills

butz2• 3 years ago

I wonder how long it will take for some important organizations and persons, and my local public transport company, to move away from X and Facebook to more open platforms?

bagels• 3 years ago

Which platforms?

butz2• 3 years ago

Mastodon?

davidw• 3 years ago

So far, the alternatives are 'inferior' in various ways.

But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...

My impressions of the alternatives:

* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.

* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.

* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.

tptacek• 3 years ago

Ever since Musk took over, Mastodon has felt pretty much identical to old Twitter for me; same people, same conversations. I recommend it. I've stopped paying attention to Bluesky.

Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.

pantalaimon• 3 years ago

The only problem I have with Mastodon is that it's hard to discover new things. If you already have some people you know who to follow that's great, but there is hardly any discovery or recommendation beyond that.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

I think it _really_ depended on what your Twitter bubble was. Mastodon generally feels like “better twitter” to me, but the sort of people I interacted with on Twitter were generally also the sort of people who’d find Mastodon appealing. (Actual Twitter now feels like a graveyard; if I look at the “Following” tab on my dormant Twitter account, there’s barely anything going on at all.) This will not be the case for everyone.

jug2• 3 years ago

Bluesky is growing and going more and more mainstream in tone by the month.

https://vqv.app/stats/chart

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

1.3M members in 5 months is nowhere near critical mass.

For reference, retired American football player and sportscaster Troy Aikman has 1.5M followers.

akmarinov2• 3 years ago

Honestly, he’s a step away from claiming global warming is a hoax…

sholladay• 3 years ago

He has been trying to convince people that global warming is not a hoax for decades. Where does your mindset come from when it is about as close to the opposite of reality as you can get? Is it just because you don't like the guy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKCuDxpccYM

I get that he is controversial. There are plenty of things to criticize Musk for. We can talk about factory conditions, replacing humans with robots, various political takes... But lumping him in with climate change deniers? That is so bonkers to me.

beej71• 3 years ago

Mastodon is already everything I wished Twitter had been. Maybe I'm not like most people, but I'm fine with that. It's a roaring success.

As far as I'm concerned, Twitter can just keep being Twitter... as long as it does it over there.

CSSer3• 3 years ago

If Threads wins, all I have to say is that we have learned nothing on this subject in the past decade and change.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

We've learned a lot. We've learned that global social media needs tens of billions of dollars in funding to succeed, and the only possible alternatives are those backed by nation-states.

I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.

colinsane2• 3 years ago

increasingly i just disagree with the metrics along which people compare these things:

1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.

2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.

and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).

Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.

rasbt• 3 years ago

When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users.

I hope they mean 200 "million" daily active users. Otherwise it would indeed be quite bleak lol

snypher2• 3 years ago

Just for context, this is what the CEO said and not an error in reporting.

tekla• 3 years ago

Twitter is still far better than the alternatives so /shrug

tonyedgecombe• 3 years ago

It's questionable whether Twitter is better than one of the alternatives, which is to not bother at all. The world was fine before Twitter came along.

aworks2• 3 years ago

For me, the alternative has been reading more books. I'm happy with the results so far.

sylware• 3 years ago

So? Is Musk going to do it for good? You know, the "small fee"?

vlod• 3 years ago

I noticed that any of my replies to tweets don't get any engagement. This is probably because the algorithm sorts by those that pay the monthly fee first, so my comment falls to bottom of the stack.

I'm not motivated to even respond for people asking for help, because they won't see it (for tweets with lots of replies).

Yeah, I realize that this will go away if I just pay the $8pm.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

A very liberal friend of mine says that he only follows other liberal folks but is constantly being inundated with right wing conspiracy shit on Twitter in his feed or suggested tweets. It's gotten so bad that he's finally going to leave the platform (after I've been telling him to leave it for years).

Can't wait to see what happens during the election year...!

mschuster913• 3 years ago

No surprises there. Even more sex bots than there ever were before Musk took over, and on top of that almost everything worth reading for a wide audience (i.e. posts of politicians and journalists) is filled with blue-checked Nazis and Russian troll farm accounts.

Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally, he wants revenge for his daughter coming out as trans - in his mind, the "woke" people on there "turned" her so [1]. Utter and complete horseshit, no one turns anyone into being or not being LGBT or is able to do so (except severe torture), the problem is he has more than enough money to burn on such ludicrous petty revenge fights and on top of that he's deeply in bed with the Saudis who have their own reasons to get rid of Twitter, most especially to prevent another Arab Spring.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/01/elon-musk-...

shikshake• 3 years ago

He’s been trying to name one of his products ‘X’ for the last 20 years? Wow. And some of his comments in this article are word for word what you would hear from raging teenagers who have nothing better to do than be angry. It’s so bizarre that people worship this guy.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

It’s so bizarre that people worship this guy.

It's bizarre now that he's completely gone off the rails and no one to keep him in check, but it's no surprise given that he was the backstory behind kicking the collective arse of the established automotive industry including the battery pioneer Toyota and the established space travel industry.

The "david vs goliath" / "underdog" theme is pretty convincing on its own.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally

I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it; everything is explicable by leadership which is not only incompetent, but too incompetent to be told it’s incompetent and take advice from competent people.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it

No one needs to interpret a conspiracy into at least the Musk side of things. It's very clear by what he says (and backed by the utter drivel he posts and reXes all day):

“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multi-planetary,” Mr Musk told Mr Isaacson.

The only angle that is a bit conspiratorial in nature is the Saudi involvement, but here it's hard to justify any other interpretation - either the Saudis ordered Musk around (which I find hard to believe), Musk conned them (even harder to believe), they underestimated Musk's intentions / the state of Twitter Inc (possible but if it were true it'd raise serious questions about their capacity/ability for due diligence) or they are silently agreeing with what is going on. I mean, they make a lot of money so they can afford to make mistakes, but many billions of dollars are still many billions of dollars.

majikaja• 3 years ago

no one turns anyone into being or not being LGBT or is able to do so (except severe torture)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fluidity

jug2• 3 years ago

The Swedish community is completely different on Bluesky now compared to before the summer and the network in general is becoming more mainstream than mostly transpersons and furries. I also love the new concept of custom algorithms. It means I can get streams based on metadata such as only in Swedish which helps a TON with community building and discovering new people, or an Instagram-like stream of photo-only posts. This would never have happened if it was business as usual over at X. So I find myself more over at Bluesky than Mastodon these days. Community trumps ideology for me but then again, I'm not rms but just a pragmatic dude.

neysofu• 3 years ago

Why is it still invite-only? They had (have?) A unique opportunity with people begging to use their service... they were in the right place at the right time, and they willingly decided to limit sign-ups and let the hype die. I'm baffled.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Last I read, they're finishing up on some architecture upgrades in order to scale the service in the future and that it should be finished by the end of the year. After that, the invites might go away.

colinsane2• 3 years ago

i heard enough about bluesky from an IRL friend that i finally went to check it out and…

sorry, but it’s got all the branding of a tech startup whose employees discuss “growth hacking” with a straight face.

https://bsky.social is just a giant splash screen where it’s impossible to learn anything more about the platform before signing up. there’s an invite system, yet simultaneously it’s supposed to be decentralized? Google around and you’ll find blueskyweb.xyz with an FAQ page which talks up the decentralization angle massively. search “how would one deploy a Bluesky instance” for an hour and eventually learn that the stack is split into like four different conceptual layers with meaningless acronym names and the parts that actually matter are closed source.

so idk, until proven otherwise Bluesky is just a PR campaign promising everything to everyone and what they’ll actually deliver is a complete mystery. still, i wish they would bridge to Activity Pub so that i could peek inside without having to tie myself to it.

MrThoughtful• 3 years ago

Musk made Twitter feel like those encyclopedias before Wikipedia came around.

I would have to become a member of a club to be able to read what people write.

Even as a member of that club, I would have to pay to be able to write more than 280 characters.

And if I don't pay, my 280 character texts get burried.

If I don't pay, I cannot write messages to everybody like paying members can.

I hope somebody will make a Mastodon fork with a nice UI soon!

JohnTHaller• 3 years ago

Your own posts are also de-buffed if you don't pay. Every post from a larger account will only have Twitter Blue in the replies for the first few dozen because those accounts are prioritized regardless of quality or engagement. And it shows.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

I’m still _kind_ of amazed that no-one managed to talk him out of that; it’s just so clearly a terrible idea. And it’s not a _new_ terrible idea; dating/hookup sites/apps have been wrestling with it for about 25 years now. Pay-for-attention is really hard to square with a well-running social site.

littlestymaar3• 3 years ago

Twitter Blue in the replies for the first few dozen because those accounts are prioritized regardless of quality or engagement. And it shows.

And half of them is Onlyfan sex workers…

ilamont• 3 years ago

I estimate about half of the once active users I follow have either greatly reduced their output or stopped entirely. This reduces the main reason for spending time there. Other problems include:

- Truly vapid blue check tweets dominating most replies.

- Accounts I don't follow being inserted into my feed

- Tweets not loading, or other technical problems

The nail in the coffin for me, if implemented: Forced paid subscriptions (https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-charging-for-tw...)

stainablesteel6• 3 years ago

sorry you don't like your feed, the algorithm feeds you whatever you interact with

the forced paid subscriptions thing was confirmed by elon to be fake news

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

the forced paid subscriptions thing was confirmed by elon to be fake news

This would be the same guy who claimed it _in the first place_? I mean, I’m not sure how much comfort one should take from that.

jqpabc123• 3 years ago

Musk wants to make X the home for misinformation of all types --- and what better way to show it than with non-sensical metrics about the product itself.

brabel2• 3 years ago

Twitter has recently started showing a kind of "fact check" on some posts that explain why it may be misleading... I've seen one of these even on an Elon's post! These are apparently added by the "community"... it seems really helpful so far!! So, I think at least this initiative is helping a lot to contain misinformation.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Hacker News users have been predicting the imminent demise of Twitter for a whole year now.

Clearly the least predictive user base. People have been "giving it two weeks" before it collapses for so long now.

Lowest quality prediction ever.

justinzollars• 3 years ago

Most of my friends who use Hacker News also left Twitter. Although, I think its more a function of being millennial, hunkering down in their safe spaces of content moderation and political total alignment. #NorthKorea

jnwatson• 3 years ago

AOL and Yahoo are still kicking. The question isn't whether Twitter will go out of business, the question is whether it will remain relevant.

Its relevance has declined significantly in the last year.

brabel2• 3 years ago

This same post links to this post by Elon Musk which shows monthly users growing: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429

Difficult to see how its relevance is declining when users are either declining very slowly or increasing, depending on which metric you look.

wholesomepotato• 3 years ago

It will collapse within a week without all the fired engineers!!1 Or on Thanks Giving. Or World Cup. Or New Year. Or... anytime now. Sooo buggy!

Predictable haters took a bite and there's a flood of self reassuring comments on how Mastodon is great.

houseatrielah2• 3 years ago

They just hate him because he's not ideologically compliant.

JackRumford• 3 years ago

Criticisms of Elon Musk are not solely based on ideological differences, but also on concerns regarding his behavior, management style, and the working conditions at his companies, which some believe warrant scrutiny irrespective of his personal beliefs. He just doesn't feel like a good person and isn't relatable. This is why I think people hate him.

scarygliders• 3 years ago

The amount of sheer bile and hostility towards Musk on this HN item alone says a lot about the hivemind at work here.

Unsubstantiated claims abound.

I mean, it's OK to dislike Musk - there are one or two things he says which I don't like, but there also things I agree with him on; I'm a big fan of SpaceX, and I wouldn't ever purchase a Tesla (even if I could afford one), but I'm finding a lot of the bile being spewed here a bit of an eye raiser.

There's a guy on here who complains about "getting stuff from accounts they're not following" - and that's probably because they're on the "For you" setting rather than the "Following" setting; they're basing their dislike of X/Twitter on something they are in complete control of, in other words. I just have to shake my head at that one. And even if they were on "Following" - it's very likely one of the accounts they're following retweets a post from some account they might not necessarily be following.

There's a post on here accusing Musk of being anti-semitic; I've yet to see one anti-semitic post Musk has ever made.

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

Literally everybody except twitter's owner is better off for it.

sidibe• 3 years ago

Not letting you visit without signing in and putting blue checks first in everything are the two worst policies for me since Elon took over. It's amazing how bad the top replies to every post are. I guess only the dumbest people are willing to pay for Twitter.

Aqueous• 3 years ago

I had a falling out with the primary account I cared about on Twitter and saw it as an opportunity to make a clean break from the platform. I have re-opened Threads and followed a significant chunk of the same people I used to follow on Twitter. It took blocking a large number of the spam, marketing and porn accounts that were showing up, but now my Threads feed is clean and virtually indistinguishable from my former Twitter feed. Got to give props to Zuck - he may somehow end up acquiring Twitter’s user base for the low, low price of $0, or however much it took to build Threads. And without having to acquire Twitter.

erulabs• 3 years ago

I’ll be convinced of twitters demise only when I stop hearing about twitter 9 times a day.

I remember waiting for Facebook to evaporate a decade ago too. Then I started hearing “Facebook” in the news every night and saw the logo on the back of Sugar packets at the cafe.

If anything - this is the biggest “no press is bad press” experiment of all time.

yanderekko• 3 years ago

Yeah, when the primary complaint about Twitter is "other people are using it to say things I dislike", then that seems like a pretty.. motivated critique of the platform.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

Facebook never evaporated… but it did become _irrelevant_. Nothing _happens on Facebook_, or at least no-one cares about what happens on Facebook.

aworks2• 3 years ago

I find Facebook groups good for my niche interests. I stopped using Twitter, though.

zeta0134• 3 years ago

The most gigantic red flag for the platform right now is that embedded twitter links are completely broken until you log in. I'm regularly *not* logged in on most of my devices, especially my work machines, and it means I'm now training myself to just not engage with the platform at all. What's the point, if I can't see what folks are posting?

stainablesteel6• 3 years ago

facebook has been like that for years but its only a problem when X does it lol

snypher2• 3 years ago

Twitter had a distinct advantage in that non-users could still, er, use the site and read threads and replies without logging in. Personally I have known not to click on Facebook links for years, but I could still give an ad impression to Twitter now and again. Now I just avoid Twitter links all together.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

I mean, doing that was arguably one factor in Facebook fading into cultural irrelevance some years ago, yes.

slowhadoken• 3 years ago

Currently if you’re “permanently suspended” you can pay to get back in by subscribing to Twitter. Daily users are being hit with the terms of service excuse.

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

So it's her fault?

stainablesteel6• 3 years ago

just another disingenuous and petty hitpiece from people who are mad that X is outcompeting the obsolete media by lightyears

Linda didn't say the number of users were declining, she said the opposite:

regarding comments from yoel: "one of the things he talked about was... 75% decline in content posted to X, that in fact is not true... and there's many days where there's more content posted to X and that is in spite of our aggressive efforts to fight spam and bots"

its around 6:40, source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

which you notice after this comment the interviewer is just a tad bit upset to hear the good news

When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation

no she didn't she was annoyed that yoel got to talk about it for 25 minutes and said that specifically while the interviewer pushed the conversation away from it

more sources citing the increase in usage

elon saying there's 3 billion views a day on long-form posts, which he says it equal to all newspapers on earth

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1704728644269064631

news regarding MONETIZABLE daily users sitting at 245 million

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707754435861008713

while total daily users are over 500 million

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707755712674160757

linda says there are even over 500 million posts per day

https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1707855477609029879

and to swing for the fences, to add to the decrease in bots, decrease in spam, and decrease in nazi content there's been a massive push on the pedophile front to remove child sexual exploitation on the platform

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1669738881246273541

pre-elon there were disgusting amounts of pedophiles on twitter, and they basically went ignored for years, apparently the old moderation team like that content

free speech is here to stay and people like it

pcwalton• 3 years ago

pre-elon there were disgusting amounts of pedophiles on twitter, and they basically went ignored for years, apparently the old moderation team like that content

There is absolutely no evidence for this, and this kind of slander is the reason why Yoel Roth received death threats.

AraceliHarker• 3 years ago

Twitter pedophilia is still active, especially in Japan, where they spread pornographic illustrations of girls on a daily basis. Twitter is not unaware of the problem, as related words are often trending, and they are probably leaving the sex offenders alone because Twitter does not have native Japanese-speaking moderators and Japan is Twitter's largest market.

deng• 3 years ago

Oh my I wasn't aware of that interview with Linda Yaccarino from Code 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

Yes, they threw her a curveball by having Yoel on before, but still, that's just painful.

thiht• 3 years ago

I completely quit Twitter in the last month for 3 reasons:

- the « my feed » tab (or whatever it’s called) is filled with Elon’s tweets. Wtf? It’s not like he’s that interesting

- their new logo with the marble effect is cringe, every time I went to open it, I decided not to instead because it’s not attractive to me. The new name is cringe too, and no one seems willing to adopt it

- and finally the last step that made me uninstall it for good is Musk’s recent stances in politics (he’s clearly pro Russian and there’s no way I’ll believe the starlink debacle in Ukraine was not directly linked to Musk and Putin ; now he has a word to say on how European countries manage the migrant crisis). He’s an asshole and I don’t think I can trust anything linked to him, including Twitter, ever again

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Check out the authors body of work, he cannot be more anti twitter. I cannot trust such “journalists”

bglazer• 3 years ago

I quit after Musk personally intervened to reinstate a user that posted CSAM. The offending material remained online, undetected by automated systems for many many hours, receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions.

This strongly indicated to me that Twitter is utterly failing in detecting CSAM. Musk’s decision to reinstate the account indicates that the reason theyre failing is that Musk doesn’t particularly care about sharing of child abuse material on his platform.

The blue check changes were annoying but this made using twitter feel straightforwardly unethical.

orwin• 3 years ago

My current gripe with Twitter is the unauthenticated access to content. I mean, I used to log in every months or so, because a random discussion was interesting and I wanted to favorite it (I think I witted twice in my life). Now it's impossible.

In the meantime reddit just made it's content more accessible for unauthenticated users. I dislike spez as much as Musk (maybe a bit more even, I still have affection for 2012 Elon, before the drugs hit him too much, and I always disliked Spez), but i'm am able to recognize when an idea is good.

rsynnott8• 3 years ago

I think this was fairly obvious once they started trumpeting all-time highs in weird metrics that no-one had ever heard of. I can find no evidence for anyone ever using the phrase “unregretted user minutes” before 2022, say.

In general, once someone introduces a weird bespoke metric, I get very, _very_ sceptical.

tzm• 3 years ago

Seems there's net gain in DAU considering X significantly purged bots that represented ~5% prior to acquisition. Also X doesn’t primarily use DAU metric anymore as it's easily manipulated. They look at other engagement metrics that are hard for bots to game.

Twitter / X is losing daily active users. CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it

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