Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts

Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.

In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.

Disaster,

It might help if they didn’t put all their efforts into killing Nitter and other useful frontends.

books,

Eh I’ve been reading this headline forever.

Call me when it’s Myspace.

hex_m_hell,

Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

dragontamer,

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO.

Nah. “X” had $Billions in cash from the buyout deal + loans. X will simply not fall until all that cash dries up, and they reach the end of their loans. Even then, Elon Musk can just command Tesla to buy a whole bunch of Twitter-advertisements to transfer money to Twitter/X and keep the party alive a bit longer.

I don’t know how long it will last. But Elon Musk was over $200 Billion in assets when he bought the company. He’s lost a ton of that money, but Elon Musk still has a long way to go before he runs out of options. It does seem like Musk’s wealth is collapsing before our eyes however (their big bet on China / Gigafactory Shanghai looks like its about to go bad this quarter), but I don’t expect X to fall until after Elon Musk runs out of money.

There’s a lot of money that needs to be deflated / lost before this whole thing collapses. But like gravity, it should be inevitable. No one can lie, steal, and cheat money forever and get away with it IMO, eventually people catch on. But it can last for more decades than people expect.

Hoticeberg,

It’s turned into such a cesspool of right wing nut jobs and musk groupies. Huge echo chamber.

frostmore,

twitter was overly woke before musk and after musk it edging close to being alt right.

gone were the days where people don’t get offended by the smallest of things and woke idiots using their nonsense to spread hatred and discrimination.

symthetics,

Can you define woke?

frostmore,

my bad,it should have been woke extremism.

woke used to mean being alert to racial discrimination and/or prejudice used by black people.

nowadays perverted by sjw to be used as a weapon to discriminate and spread hatred.

symthetics,

So you mean racism.

frostmore,

basically bigotry, discrimination,racism not that much different used by right wing nutjobs.

symthetics,

Do you have an example?

frostmore,

reddit would be awashed with plenty but you probably can’t find much since the woke mods are banning and deleting posts and calling it whatever phobia they find convenient.

symthetics,

So no examples to back up your claim. Ok.

frostmore,

sure. we 😊

TwigletSparkle,

Woke is just a dogwhistle for bigots now. Instead of “I hate that there are gay people in my movie” it’s now “Going woke ruined this movie”.

symthetics,

I know, I was just curious how many steps it would take before they were honest about their own bigotry.

Of course they don’t have the balls to be, so instead stay vague and deflect.

TwigletSparkle,

I thought as much; I was just hijacking the conversation to put that in black & white for passers by =)

symthetics,

Haha all good :D

arc,

I use Twitter through a browser and ad blocker and the content is borderline dogshit as it is. I use it because inertia means the things I want to find are still represented there. But it can’t be long before some major accounts move elsewhere, or deprioritize their presence. I’m thinking mainly of news orgs, but NGOs and governments might move too.

100_kg_90_de_belin,

“The platform struggles to attract and keep users”: why should I give up my data to an alt-right platform owned by a billionaire?

SomeGuy69,

For Twitter I’m apparently also a turbo user, as I get loading errors every day, after opening a few tabs quickly. Then it takes a while before I’m unblocked. Before Elon bought Twitter this never happened.

megopie,

What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.

To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.

AAA,

Social media fatigue is slowly getting traction. I don’t have an article or study at hand to back it up, but I read about it the other day. Especially in younger generations it’s a trend already.

Also, but that’s only my personal theorie, i think it’s a trend only among the less-hateful people. Hateful people nonstop spewing their vile messages everywhere is making “normal” people leave, which then turns off even more “normal” people.

The enraged slowly turning (unmoderated) social media into one big echo chamber.

aesthelete, (edited )

It’s really not fun to be on any of the platforms anymore, if it ever even was.

I don’t know if there will be a new thing, but if there is I think it can’t look like any existing platform as they’re all kind of trash and have largely the same problems.

I think there was also a naive technological optimism in the early 2000s and 2010s that has died off quite a bit. Tech companies came in looking like they were using some new type of capitalism that wasn’t all about the almighty dollar, but instead about progress more generally…now most of us know better.

Notorious_handholder, (edited )

There was a period in the mid 2000’s of like 3-4 years where social media was fun and not super toxic. It was still toxic to a degree, but nowhere near like it is now. Then it started to decline rapidly once the general public started to get involved as smart phones became better and better at helping keep people terminally online.

I hate sounding like a hipster, but everything good or at least semi-decent really does come to an end once it gets saturated by the general public.

aesthelete,

Totally agree with all of this. Facebook was actually fun when I first used it. I wouldn’t call it anything even remotely resembling fun at this point.

Reddit was similar. Now every platform (including actually this one, sorry guys) I find myself dreading when there’s a response in my inbox because everything is just overwhelmingly bitter and full of disagreement online. I am guilty of it myself, too…but part of me thinks the format has to change drastically in order to become fun again.

r3df0x,

Right wing “free speech” spaces tend to crash and burn hard. If they don’t moderate blatant racism and shitty behavior, the white supremacists drive out all the sane people, but if they do moderate, then shit stains like Tim Pool will start casting massive amounts of FUD onto the platform and claim that it has “gone woke” and isn’t a true free speech platform.

jabjoe,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

It’s something you see endless repeated. When there is no rules, you get the loudest, baddest, pieces of work, rise to the top and then set rules that favour them. Look over the world and history, where law and order has broke down, war/drug lords take over.

I lived in Holland for a bit, my Dutch colleagues told a story of the bus system. Holland tried a honor payment system, trusting people to pay what they needed to for their trip. It failed hard and was replaced with fair collectors my colleagues called “the bus Nazis”.

The same thing happens with free speech absolutism. You hit “Paradox of tolerance”.

Anarchy just doesn’t work. You need rules for everyone to play nice by.

Krauerking,

I mean look at how self checkouts are now looking at putting a hold of $100 on your card you use or Walmart requiring that you are a subscriber of their plan so they can hunt you down if you steal stuff.

It’s cheaper for sure to just let people do whatever they want, but people suck and mostly just care about themselves. And we really don’t care about the minor rules when those making them feel like they have all the power.

Humanity works when it’s the people all agreeing to shared set of rules and interacting with each other to keep it in check.

jabjoe,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

Yep, “Tragedy of the Commons”

Harbinger01173430,

Now that you mention Paradox, I think we need neural parasites to turn us into a well ordered hive mind like in that Paradox Interactive game known as Stellaris. 🧐

Churbleyimyam,

LOOOOOOL

dynamojoe,

I need someone to tell me why Musk won’t be a huge buyer of DWAC when it opens. How much of Truth Social would he need to get it merged with Twitter, which would get Trump back on the platform. Musk gets to help out the psycho conservative right and he gets to help himself.

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

It would get attention, but can that attention be translated into ad revenue? So it doesn’t really help Musk out, and would be a bad move. So it seems like a stupid thing to do. So he’ll probably do it.

dynamojoe,

Trump is a meta-generator; there are articles critical of the articles critical of his coverage. Anyone could sell ads under a Trump tweet. How many real people joined Truth Social just to follow Trump, and more just to be able to see what the orange bastard spewed? There’s a reason pre-Musk Twitter bent over backwards to keep the shit-flinging orangutan on their platform.

If Musk does nothing, Twitter dies in a slow spiral. He has to do something. What better way than to get a guy who people can’t stop paying attention to, a frontrunner in an election season? The man gets clicks. If he’s already dropped $44B on Twitter, what’s another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Imagine Trump posts something about “killing immigrant vermin” and there’s a Nike swish with the slogan “Just Do It” beside it.

How much money do you think advertisers will pay when this is a possibility?

You’re thinking solely in terms of getting attention. And yeah no doubt Trump being on Twitter would get attention. The question is how do you turn that attention into revenue?

If he’s already dropped $44B on Twitter, what’s another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?

You’ve jumped to the conclusion that this will save Twitter. The problem is that this will get attention (which actually costs money in bandwidth) without a clear way to make money off of it. So he’d be spending billions on something that would not get him back into the good graces of advertisers and probably cement the inevitable destruction of twitter, not save it.

Like I say, it’s Elon Musk so the fact that it’s a bad move means he might actually do it.

yoz,

Even of nobody uses twitter , he got the money to keep it running for next 100 years.

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Not really. His wealth isn’t in money, it’s in shares of companies like Tesla. If Tesla drops in value his wealth drops. If he sells shares in Tesla to subsidize Twitter, the value of his remaining shares in Tesla drops. Which is why he borrowed a lot of money from the Saudis to acquire Twitter. Using Tesla shares as collateral. Tesla stock is crazy overvalued, and he’s leveraged it to shit. It’s possible Elon Musk could be bankrupt in a couple of years.

yoz,

I see a lot of “if”

marx2k,

Tesla is down 31.23% YTd

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Normally it would be “he won’t do that because it would be completely stupid.” But since we’re talking about Elon Musk, it’s gotta be “If he does this stupid thing here’s what could happen.”

EmperorHenry,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Weird, whenever I browse twitter I see loads of people of all kinds tweeting things.

VerbFlow,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

Whenever I browse Twitter I do it because others link to it

spoiler, and a lot of porn originates from there

. I’m glad that people are moving away, because that means these not as many people will use it as a primary source, and post art and other stuff somewhere else.

BreakDecks,

It’s almost like “fewer people” is a distinctly different concept from “nobody”.

PrefersAwkward,
@PrefersAwkward@lemmy.world avatar

What do you mean Albuquerque has fewer people than NYC? One time I was at this cafe in Albuquerque and it was packed!

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” - Yogi Berra

EmperorHenry,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

People on mastodon and lemmy keep saying twitter is dead, but it’s actually very active.

One of the idiots that replied to that comment of mine literally said they don’t go there anymore but looked at me like I’m some kind of idiot for just saying that people are still tweeting. Out of the two of us, I’m the one who still goes there, they don’t go there anymore.

So who do you think would know better about what’s going on on twitter as of late?

VerbFlow,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

As for me, it should be dead. I’m tired of having people link Twitter, as if any good person will join a discussion on there. It’s a digital parasite feeding off ad revenue and it should be taken down so people stop linking to it and posting on there.

BreakDecks,
  1. The post you responded to didn’t say that Twitter is “dead”.
  2. People who still use Twitter are, in fact, idiots.
  3. NBC News does seem to be a more credible source than you on this topic.
Stopthatgirl7,
@Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world avatar

Because the algorithm will always try to fill the timeline with something. It’s not going to show you empty spaces where tweets WOULD have been if people who left had been there.

EmperorHenry,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I don’t see any empty spaces.

Stopthatgirl7,
@Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world avatar

Yes. Because the algorithm fills them with tweets from other people. That’s why it seems like there are still the same number of people there even though there aren’t.

radicalautonomy,

Right? I browse Twitter a lot and whenever I do I just kidding no I don’t.

kilorat,
@kilorat@lemmy.world avatar

Elon was right when he said history will remember who killed Twitter, but we disagree on who

hOrni,

People acting as if twitter is something important. And killing it is meaningful. In Europe we don’t use it. Literally. I’m Polish, I never had a twitter account and don’t know anybody who has. The whole twitter/musk debacle is a war over nothing.

seliaste, (edited )
@seliaste@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It was pretty widely used in France

forgeddit, (edited )

Just because it’s not popular in your social bubble in Europe doesn’t mean it’s not important. I’m European, and I found it very useful during e.g. COVID or the start of the European invasion. (Ukraine*)

Of course there were problems with fake accounts back then, but it was still the best platform for curated expert feeds if you followed the right people.

It’s not the same anymore, many of the experts have left and especially the feeds don’t have the replies of other verified e.g. scientists. Similar to Reddit, but probably even worse/more noticeable.

Ellecram,

American here. Never used twitter. Never pay attention to it.

turkishdelight,

Twitter is even more cringe than LinkedIn, which is saying something.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • technology@lemmy.world
  • thenastyranch
  • DreamBathrooms
  • tacticalgear
  • magazineikmin
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • Youngstown
  • mdbf
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • ethstaker
  • InstantRegret
  • kavyap
  • ngwrru68w68
  • megavids
  • cisconetworking
  • cubers
  • osvaldo12
  • modclub
  • GTA5RPClips
  • tester
  • Durango
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • normalnudes
  • JUstTest
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •