I think we're pretty much out of interesting things to say about post-acquisition Twitter (Twixtter?); it seems to have settled into a stable state of lower expenditures counterbalanced by a smaller userbase and significantly reduced ad revenue, coupled to a dependency on lower-quality ads relative to pre-acquisition buyers.
I'm hard-pressed to think of any changes that, at least in my experience, have qualitatively improved the experience, but the bleeding appears to have slowed, app reliability is reduced but not apparently an existential threat, much-feared competitors have had little effect on market share (particularly Meta and TikTok's dismal attempts at capturing Twitter users), and, while Bluesky has picked up a great many high-profile posters, Twitter has replaced that volume to some degree by becoming what's essentially a more socially-acceptable Gab.
The only question is whether, given the predictable failure of Musk's attempt to become a subscription-based rather than ad-based business, its cash flow can support a balance sheet that's loaded up with debt based on an unsupportable valuation. Twixtter may be stable, but "stable" doesn't necessarily mean "surviving."
I am still a regular user, but it has become more of a chore than a joy.
The lively exchange of ideas without agendas (or with less of an agenda) is absent. Instead I do get some useful information about tech industry trends by some stalwart contributors. Also my spam-and-scam messages have gone up by 10x.
I suppose I could make more effort to mine other sources like Medium or decentralized Twitter clones, but haven't yet done so.
I'll put up with the dreariness and annoyances of X for now, but the instant I find a better alternative, I'm gone.
I used to use Twitter to find interesting things to read, but de-viralizing links (and now the headlines don't even appear) has neutered Twitter for that purpose, and IME made it much dumber. Substack Notes is better for finding things to read but still small.
bsky probably holds the most promise, but the platform’s going through some Eternal September growth pains right now, and it’s not clear what will emerge once federation is baked in. Nonetheless, most of my Twitter subgraphs have migrated over there in the last few months, so it’s finally getting a pretty crowded feel to it, at least for me. Not a drop-in replacement for Twitter, particularly on fast-moving breaking news, but Twixtter is no longer “where news happens” either.
Well, a few hours ago I would have said “stable but sinking,” but now that Musk is moving to a mandatory subscription (for anti-bot reasons) I guess we can downgrade to “unstable and sinking.”
I don't think Twitter even has lower expenditures going for it considering the massive debt payments. Losing half of revenue and keeping expenses about the same is, well, a pretty bad spot to be in. I think the big question is how much money Elon will incenerate before trying to find a face-saving way to bail out.
Bluesky has more modest goals, so it hasn't siphoned away a huge number of users, but -- purely anecdotally -- it's picked up a lot of the high-profile, high-volume, wide-distribution posters, such as dril or, more recently, a large number of journalists, as part of a fairly well-executed poaching strategy. (Post.news also took this approach, but it hasn't been quite as successful, and over the medium term I don't think a VC-funded, micropayments-based platform has much in the way of legs.)
bsky's small in absolute terms (about 1.5mm users), and lacks the global audience reach that Twitter still has, but it's got better "stickiness" than, say, Threads. This, oddly, makes it a bit more of a threat than Twitter's large-scale competitors, because Twitter has always been reliant on a small number of posters generating the bulk of its widely-shared content, and a small number of high-usage users generating the bulk of its ad views. Losing a relatively small number of the most dedicated Twitter users hurts more than a larger number of low-usage/low-ARPU users.
Where bsky goes from here is an open question (complex systems are notoriously hard to predict, and as they add more users without concomitant improvements in their other systems -- think T&S -- things could go pretty badly pretty quickly), but by damaging Twitter's content generation engine they are probably doing more damage to Twitter's P&L than Threads or Lemon8 ever did.
What I don’t understand is why competitors can’t just make an actual twitter clone with the associated resources instead of some variation like threads or blue sky. Just make a performant clone to begin with and then iterate from that point out.
> I think we're pretty much out of interesting things to say about post-acquisition Twitter (Twixtter?); it seems to have settled into a stable state of lower expenditures counterbalanced by a smaller userbase and significantly reduced ad revenue, coupled to a dependency on lower-quality ads relative to pre-acquisition buyers.
I'm not sure that "stable" is the correct term, as Elon Musk's Twitter is dealing with lawsuits because the company is so screwed they can't even afford to pay for their offices.
It’s more that he’s chosen to call a number of people’s bluff with these “what are you going to do, sue me!” tactics. If the company was just insolvent they’d have been able to negotiate deals to do things like end leases early or defer full payments but those tactics add legal fees to the full value of each debt.
> It’s more that he’s chosen to call a number of people’s bluff with these “what are you going to do, sue me!” tactics.
That's an overly charitable spin on the fact that Elon Musk's Twitter is hemorrhaging money and can't even pay the rent of their headquarters.
> If the company was just insolvent (...)
There's a big difference between being ran to the ground and actually be bankrupt. Elon Musk is still deemed one of the world's richest persons, so there is no question that the company's owner can inject capital into a failing business to pay rent.
As Elon Musk simply refuses to pay, Elon Musk's Twitter was issue an order to be evicted.
This is a good point. The decline in traffic and active users is proof that nobody has stopped using this website. By a similar metric you can see, based off of its Alexa rank, MySpace is still the most popular social media site by far.
Well, anecdotally it feels like infosec and osint twitter are rotten husks of their former glory. There used to be vibrant discussions and commentary, but I guess it depends on what you do/follow on Twitter.
MAU might be flat, but I can almost guarantee the bot or inauthentic traffic is what are keeping those numbers flat. Heck, a non zero amount of that inauthentic traffic has paid for twitter for purposes of spam or propaganda.
Protip: you can generally tell a sites actual user base by the quality of ads and their ad revenue. They are running non brand safe ads and reports are their ad revenue is a fraction of pre-musk levels. I half expect them to start running straight up taboola ads at some point.
Speak for yourself! Everyone I know personally have left and re-founded the sources they followed there elsewhere. Anecdotal? Sure it is! All we're going to get from X is anecdote or lies about usage anyway, so why not lean into it, huh?
It was complete hysteria a year ago from a highly emotionally charged audience. I think we have given the doomsday folks plenty of time for their predictions around the complete collapse of Twitter / X to manifest and it turns out that it did not happen and the platform is still alive.
Obviously the so-called 'exodus' never happened and their top predictions have failed to come true [0]. But it just shows that even most HNers at the time fell for the media exaggerations because it was the click-bait trend. Happened with the so-called collapse of Meta and once again with Twitter / X.
The deaths of both Meta and Twitter / X, have been greatly exaggerated. It is time to admit that such predictions like this [1] and this [2] aged extremely poorly 1 year on.
I'm hard-pressed to think of any changes that, at least in my experience, have qualitatively improved the experience, but the bleeding appears to have slowed, app reliability is reduced but not apparently an existential threat, much-feared competitors have had little effect on market share (particularly Meta and TikTok's dismal attempts at capturing Twitter users), and, while Bluesky has picked up a great many high-profile posters, Twitter has replaced that volume to some degree by becoming what's essentially a more socially-acceptable Gab.
The only question is whether, given the predictable failure of Musk's attempt to become a subscription-based rather than ad-based business, its cash flow can support a balance sheet that's loaded up with debt based on an unsupportable valuation. Twixtter may be stable, but "stable" doesn't necessarily mean "surviving."