Turns out forcing people to use Twitter less makes people use Twitter less, what a discovery!
But have you considered paying $8 a month to use features that used to be free and also associate yourself with far right?
If you’re still on Twitter, you’re part of the problem. I don’t care about your excuses.
Well look at me, I’m part of the problem.
Good! Hope to see the same stories about Reddit and other major social media platforms that have taken steps to prioritize profit over the community.
The users are your golden apple. Abuse them, the apple turns sour.
I thought the proverb was: cook a golden goose and you’ll eat for a day. Teach the golden goose to lay eggs and you’ll eat for a lifetime.
Gold is edible btw. Or at least inedible and non-toxic. It passes through without chemically reacting.
Give a man a fire, you’ll keep him warm for a night. Light a man on fire, you’ll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
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We should have that “your joke but worse” community here.
Proverbial fish: am I a joke to you?
Mine was just made up on the fly. Been playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom lately and had to round up some golden apples for something, lol
The fact that people who have paid get to have their replies appear first means that you see the people with the worst opinions (people who are fine with giving Musk money) most of the time, just makes it a very un-fun experience.
That’s why I left. That’s all I see on replies
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great. It isn’t advertising, or social manipulation, or exorbitant subscription fees and API charges. It isn’t restriction of speech or freedom of speech, it isn’t algorithmically controlled moderation and curation.
It is the people that make a social network great.
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What consumers and products? I only see numbers on a spreadsheet going up and down!
It is the people that make a social network great.
You’re right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It’s the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.
Disagree. They know. It’s just that they’re trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform’s interests are constantly at war with the user’s interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.
Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.
Call it “enshittification”: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
While it is true, there are also some factors which make people converge on some platforms. Factors beyond simply presence of other people. Like technical features.
The biggest technical feature that draws users is the Interface. Twitter didn’t gain popularity (or even the Bird icon and “tweet” moniker) until Tweetie, Twitteriffic and eventually Tweetbot came along.
Reddit was just a website for (no offence intended) “neckbearded basement dwelling incels” until RiF and Apollo made it more accessible.
Mastodon usage soared when 3rd Party Twitter apps were killed and once once again when Ivory was released.
I didn’t even know about Lemmy until I heard @[email protected] and @[email protected] mentioned it on The Talk Show. I didn’t start using it regularly until I discovered wefwef and Memmy.
You’re not wrong about there being multiple factors, but I’d argue that this is often the least important factor. The technical features are easily replicated. (See: threads, stories, reels/tiktoks/shorts, etc.)
Network effects, on the other hand, have a stranglehold like no other.
You’re on Facebook because your family’s on there. You’re on Twitter because your favorite meme pages are on there. You’re on Instagram because the photographer you really like is on there. So on and so forth.
They don’t care about making a great or even good product. It’s solely about making as much money in as short a time period as possible, regardless of the long term consequences.
I don’t have access to Twitter’s balance sheet, but I’d wager a guess that they’re on financial life support in the short term, and they’ve got a stage 4 cancer diagnosis in the long term.
The only thing Twitter has going for them over a competitor like Mastodon or Threads, is their name. And Musk has made sure their name is covered in shit and mud.
Twitter was doomed before Musk bought them, and they’re super doomed now.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
Wonder how much of it is because of Threads and how much of it is from making the site inaccessible without accounts and the rate limit.
Hard to tell. It’s been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.
They removed the need for an account to view tweets not long after they implemented it.
As far as I know the rate limit is still in effect though.
I wonder, how many schools could you build for $44billion?
A random online estimator told me about 27m for a high school in the US. So like 1466 if you round that up to 30m for easier math.
They built a new elementary school down the road a few years ago. It cost $63 million, so about 700 of those.
Might make sense. Cost seems to be 250-800 per square foot depending on construction method and quality.
The example I looked at was for a two story 130,000 sqft I think. But some districts shovel all students into one mega school, so they would be huge and much more expensive.
On a side note: Why is this image (from Threads, don’t know the version accessible on Twitter, as it’s not accessible to me) a JPEG, and a very much compressed one, too? You see non-tech people sharing screenshot JPEGs all the time, but they are usually in okay quality and only degrade when shared and edited a lot. This one is basically unreadable from the beginning, and it’s posted by a guy who studied computer science and leads a leading tech company since 14 years. Or is it really Threads transcoding and downgrading images so much?
In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it’s the photo sharing community’s microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.
EDIT: In the next meantime, Threads itself seems to be dead, at least the embeeded tweet (or thread, or whatever they call it) in the Verge article has been replaced by a “View on Threads” button which leads me to an absolutely blank page.
Instagram completely mangles image quality, and Threads seems to be tied into Instagram stuff on the back-end, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening here.
Good news everyone!
To the surprise of no one besides Musk, probably
I’m here for the schadenfreude, but it’s horrible PR for Cloudflare to post the traffic graph of one of their customers tanking. And their CEO doing it, no less.
It’s not a graph of their protection product(s), it’s a graph from their DNS-service.
They don’t get the Data from Twitter, they get it from the UsersI’m not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There’s no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.
DNS Queries don’t care about your silly PR. DNS is king.
It’s free widespread advertisement for cloudflare, we’re even talking about them right now
tbf the more people hear about cloudflare, the less people want to do with them.
The opposite, they do great things abd they have awesome products. Yes, they are expensive, but good too and you can get good stuff for free too.
Twitter isn’t their customer friends.
If I were Akamai, I’d be sure that my sales team knew to bring it up casually in conversation with every customer. Can’t buy trust, have to earn it, and you can squander it all so easily.
