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Twitter usage drops
(slate.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Enough Musk Spam
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What a strange saga. Elon fundamentally miscalculated what Twitter meant to it's users before the acquisition and didn't spend any time trying to figure it out at the start.
The first few months' dramatic changes were like watching a train wreck, so it's no surprise usage was going up. At the time Elon was the chief troll and every day brought some crazy announcement. For some reason that is not a surprise, his posts were always at the top of every feed.
I think today it's just a sad state of affairs and everybody is bored with the antics. You can't build a social media presence on a site like this.
Finally the rebrand to X was clearly a miscalculated attempt to get fleeing users to reconsider, it's just that instead of bring old users back he got current users to reconsider and bail.
The only valuable thing about Twitter was the brand. If Twitter isn't named Twitter anymore it might as well be a turd on the sidewalk.
Ironically that's what Twitter has always been: a turd on the sidewalk.
Twitt has always sucked but now it's a flaming one made out of phosphorus.
I'll just never understand this opinion. Did you actually use it or is your opinion based solely off screenshots people posted on reddit? You didn't have to see all the shit that people say made Twitter bad...My feed never had politics and the only celebrities I saw were comedians or people subtweeting to make fun of them.
Twitter didn't suck. It was a great platform for comedy..basically text Vine. In my opinion, Twitter's downward slide started the day they rolled out 280 characters...but even then it stayed great until people (and bots) started joining to follow Trump...and even THEN it stayed good until Musk bought it.
It's like hating on reddit. The culture is/was awful in many ways, but it had enough redeeming qualities to be entertaining and keep us there. I did have a Twitter account, yes... I never got much engagement or useful interactions until 2-3 years ago, and I did enjoy it for a while. It is interesting how it was semi-anonymous but gave people the opportunity to express their personalities. Some of my favorite accounts were the humorists, like NYT Pitchbot or offline famous authors who I loved hearing from like Sandra Boynton. I also liked that many people I knew in person were on there and I could contact them there vs. IG or FB or whatever.
Still, the various cliches of the platform were even worse than the cliches of reddit. And yeah, after Musk bought it and it was apparent what a shitshow that would be, I deleted my 2009-era account. (they bought vine and killed it, also)
I think it's more like Tumblr. It gets (got, really. The hate train is basically over) a ton of hate because of a couple of bad communities yet every other platform loves the funny screenshots
I did use it, yes. And I hated it. There was absolutely nothing I got from Twitter that I didn't get with far superior quality elsewhere. Even FACEBOOK was better (and I ditched that the same day I ditched Twitter).
The major issue that Twitter had was that it eliminated any hint of subtlety or nuance from communication. Nuance in particular died at the altar of that fucking 140 (later 280) character restriction. It was basically only an echo chamber amplifier and nothing else. So, you know, absolutely everything I hate in "modern" communication.
Rotten apple spoils the bunch and all that. The platform was good for doing comedy, but it is also good for spreading misinformation and nazi propaganda, and that makes the whole thing bad, no matter how good the good parts are
I don't think there was anything calculated about the X rebrand, other than that he wanted to do it all along since he's still angsty about his 'X' never being a major website. And yes, he has never really understood the platform and how much he cares is a mystery.
The decline was inevitable. What did surprise me, and is I guess a sign of ex-Twitter engineer competence, is that the platform did not succumb to entropy weeks after the first wave of mass layoffs. I expected events like "Twitter down for days because team responsible for renewing SSL certificates no longer exists" or "posting new tweets takes hours because the DBA team was decimated and no one remembered to repartition the tables".
It is a surprise, especially given the unplanned data center moves and micro-services debacle. I can imagine there were a lot of frantic phone calls from current Twitter engineers to former Twitter engineers begging for help at various points along the way. I wonder if any of the ex-engineers required expensive pre-paid consulting contracts before offering any assistance!
Twitter’s front end is not the only product that can break.
For instance analytics and ad servers can break without the end user even noticing it. Drop in revenues could be the results of a miscalculation, a corrupted database or anything.
There are so much ways of going wrong that we wouldn’t know about.
Oh for sure, and there were a couple of noticable incidents where partial functionality broke, like SMS 2FA. But I was expecting more pervasive problems - a Hindenburg vs a gradual descent into senility.
I do agree with you that it’s been more stable than I expected, but it’s not like everything’s been fine. They’ve throttled usage a few times, there was that weekend where they pretty much just shut down. Although lately it’s been a bit better, there were a few weeks there where I couldn’t get twitter links to work more than a third of the time, and videos are still iffy. Plus, we don’t have visibility into all of their operations. I’d have no way of knowing if Twitter Japan was down for twenty minutes on Wednesday. Most people just retry, and small outages are forgot to g about by everyone except the ops center.