> As Twitter has entered the Musk era, many people are leaving the platform or rethinking its role in their lives...According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far since Musk’s ownership, and all of this information has left the platform along with them.
Is this overblown? Twitter has +200 million MAUs and if a million of them left that's 0.5% of the user base. If 99.5% of the users and the content remains on Twitter (and even if we assume that no one has joined Twitter in the same period) is it really that big a deal?
In the course of Google+'s lifespan, I had several opportunities to look at dynamics of profile and community activity on the platform.
Sampling a random selection of ~50k profiles, I found that only 9% had ever posted public content, and ~ 0.3% had been active within the past month (excluding YouTube activity exposed through G+). This itself is an interesting validation of the 90-90-1 rule of thumb for online discussion participation.
I also had a chance to look at several lists of highly-active / highly-ranked profiles over time, and found that, at least to a first approximation, more activity was a stronger predictor of later account deletion --- whether elected by the individual (e.g., disenchanted) or the platform (spam / abuse removal). This is counterintuitive at first blush but makes sense on modest reflection.
For Communities, what I found was a fantastic rate of creation and destruction. There were ~8 million communities created by the time new communities were discontinued (~January 2019), and the creation rate was on the order of thousands per day. There was also a high destruction rate, evidenced by the fact that within an hour or so, many of the communities which had been listed via a recent sitemaps query were no longer extant. I'd commented on that at the time.
For Twitter, it's highly probable that:
- Account defections are among more active members.
- Those members account for a large fraction of overall content.
- Those members account for a large fraction of significant content. E.g., not spam or bot traffic.
Of Twitter's 200m MAUs, it's likely that roughly 90% (180m) participate seldom if at all, 9% (~18m) occasionally, and roughly 2 million are the most active members. Loss of as few as a few percent of all members could see removal of virtually all substantive content.
It really depends who that million people are... Definitely not bots... maybe a million active users? maybe people like me that doesn't use the platform that much but don't want to give elon more money nor attention? (which I'm clearly doing here)
It is a big deal if a million of active users leave.
It doesn’t matter who is at the helm, if you rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google to preserve history then it is at risk. Preserve it yourself or forever hold your peace.
Is this overblown? Twitter has +200 million MAUs and if a million of them left that's 0.5% of the user base. If 99.5% of the users and the content remains on Twitter (and even if we assume that no one has joined Twitter in the same period) is it really that big a deal?