Beginning of the end for Twitter?

[Dusk_Till_Dawn]

1 minute ago, I P Knightley said:

Running Twitter involves knowing a little bit about how humans operate. 

It does.

 

there’s a lot to hate about Twitter as it was before Musk got hold of it but in some respects, it was a good and fun resource.

 

Concerning when he is free to destroy it, simply because he’s a billionaire and can do whatever he likes.

[The Mighty Thor]

3 minutes ago, Dusk_Till_Dawn said:

It does.

 

there’s a lot to hate about Twitter as it was before Musk got hold of it but in some respects, it was a good and fun resource.

 

Concerning when he is free to destroy it, simply because he’s a billionaire and can do whatever he likes.

He's way too vain to effectively de-platform himself and his right wing buddies by putting the shite they trot out behind a pay wall. 

 

Especially in a US election year when his big orange mate will need the vehicle to appeal to his half-witted followers.

[Placid Casual]

3 minutes ago, Dusk_Till_Dawn said:

It does.

 

there’s a lot to hate about Twitter as it was before Musk got hold of it but in some respects, it was a good and fun resource.

 

Concerning when he is free to destroy it, simply because he’s a billionaire and can do whatever he likes.

 

Yes, Twitter could be brilliant and funny at times. Much more in the early days.

 

I finally received my Bluesky invite last week. Looks like Bluesky and Threads are apps that many people will jump to. Think I prefer Bluesky, but not used either extensively yet.

[Cade]

31 minutes ago, Jim_Duncan said:

Journalists everywhere shitting themselves. 

 

RIP Edinburgh Live

 

[Ulysses]

35 minutes ago, I P Knightley said:

When you've got JKB available free of charge, you don't need to pay a Twitter subscription to find the sort of nonsense that populates half of my feed - even though I prune Twitter regularly. 

 

Interesting to watch a financially very successful businessman make such a complete arse of a $44billion investment. 

 

I know this may seem like an odd question, but I'll ask it anyway.

 

Has he actually made such an arse of it?  I mean, aside from the fact that he paid too much for Twitter, what damage has he done?

 

He's managed to lose a lot of existing advertisers, but there's still plenty of advertising on my feed, including a fair number of well-known companies, which suggests that he's still got people willing to advertise.

 

Millions of people are moaning and complaining about X, or having a laugh at the bin fire it's turned into.  But who's actually left?  Everyone is still watching and still scrolling, with no real sign of diminishing viewing numbers - which is all that really matters for a service like Twitter.

 

It's shit, but despite all the nonsense it's showing no signs of getting any smaller.  And what's the alternative?

 

Making people pay is a big gamble, and I think it might be the thing that'll finish Twitter off, but so far I'm not 100% convinced that (from a marketing point of view) Musk is making as much of a bollix of this as we'd like to think.  It's a bit like Ryanair. We all hate them, but we still fly with them.

[Ulysses]

4 minutes ago, Placid Casual said:

 

Yes, Twitter could be brilliant and funny at times. Much more in the early days.

 

I finally received my Bluesky invite last week. Looks like Bluesky and Threads are apps that many people will jump to. Think I prefer Bluesky, but not used either extensively yet.

 

I'm on Bluesky.  It's much nicer than Twitter, and also a bit shit.  Never tried Threads.

[Mikey1874]

5 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

I know this may seem like an odd question, but I'll ask it anyway.

 

Has he actually made such an arse of it?  I mean, aside from the fact that he paid too much for Twitter, what damage has he done?

 

He's managed to lose a lot of existing advertisers, but there's still plenty of advertising on my feed, including a fair number of well-known companies, which suggests that he's still got people willing to advertise.

 

Millions of people are moaning and complaining about X, or having a laugh at the bin fire it's turned into.  But who's actually left?  Everyone is still watching and still scrolling, with no real sign of diminishing viewing numbers - which is all that really matters for a service like Twitter.

 

It's shit, but despite all the nonsense it's showing no signs of getting any smaller.  And what's the alternative?

 

Making people pay is a big gamble, and I think it might be the thing that'll finish Twitter off, but so far I'm not 100% convinced that (from a marketing point of view) Musk is making as much of a bollix of this as we'd like to think.  It's a bit like Ryanair. We all hate them, but we still fly with them.

 

You're right it hasn't changed that much for most people.

 

The extremist content cam be ignored and its quite funny seeing some of it. Some people are having problems with their feeds eg Ukrainian activists saying they are losing access. 

 

It will change if he charges. It will be over. Just who takes over but the alternatives are there. 

[I P Knightley]

1 hour ago, Ulysses said:

 

I know this may seem like an odd question, but I'll ask it anyway.

 

Has he actually made such an arse of it?  I mean, aside from the fact that he paid too much for Twitter, what damage has he done?

 

He's managed to lose a lot of existing advertisers, but there's still plenty of advertising on my feed, including a fair number of well-known companies, which suggests that he's still got people willing to advertise.

 

Millions of people are moaning and complaining about X, or having a laugh at the bin fire it's turned into.  But who's actually left?  Everyone is still watching and still scrolling, with no real sign of diminishing viewing numbers - which is all that really matters for a service like Twitter.

 

It's shit, but despite all the nonsense it's showing no signs of getting any smaller.  And what's the alternative?

 

Making people pay is a big gamble, and I think it might be the thing that'll finish Twitter off, but so far I'm not 100% convinced that (from a marketing point of view) Musk is making as much of a bollix of this as we'd like to think.  It's a bit like Ryanair. We all hate them, but we still fly with them.

My 'making and arse of it' comment was a projection for if he implements a paywall. I suspect that there would be an exodus and that, in turn would affect advertisers both in terms of who advertises on Twitter (knowing the type of people remaining) and how much they're prepared to pay to get seen by a smaller market. 

[Sooperstar]

1 hour ago, Cade said:

 

RIP Edinburgh Live

 

Where do I vote to expedite the demise of the app formerly known as Twitter? 

[Cade]

35 minutes ago, Sooperstar said:

Where do I vote to expedite the demise of the app formerly known as Twitter? 

 

Fear not, as long as Tripadvisor is still up, Edinburgh Live can still copy and paste reviews and call it an article.

 

[Gundermann]

3 hours ago, I P Knightley said:

When you've got JKB available free of charge, you don't need to pay a Twitter subscription to find the sort of nonsense that populates half of my feed - even though I prune Twitter regularly. 

 

Interesting to watch a financially very successful businessman make such a complete arse of a $44billion investment. 

 

 

A queue of Twitter's worse attention-seeking aholes is forming... 'Lozza' Fox, Farage, George Galloway, Rev Stu, Trump...

[Gundermann]

3 hours ago, Ulysses said:

 

I'm on Bluesky.  It's much nicer than Twitter, and also a bit shit.  Never tried Threads.

 

Mastodon.scot is also a lot nicer. Am suspicious of Threads - just another Facebook ploy to hoover up our data, I fear.

[henrysmithsgloves]

On 19/09/2023 at 11:44, Mikey1874 said:

That will be the end for X. 

 

[Mikey1874]

The Russians seeking to influence the 2024 Presidential elections have a good budget to pay subscriptions. The mass of people that will leave the platform may balance that out. 

[Ulysses]

19 hours ago, I P Knightley said:

My 'making and arse of it' comment was a projection for if he implements a paywall. I suspect that there would be an exodus and that, in turn would affect advertisers both in terms of who advertises on Twitter (knowing the type of people remaining) and how much they're prepared to pay to get seen by a smaller market. 

 

It would represent a radical change to the existing business model.  Existing "content creators" who want to monetise their stuff on Twitter already have to pay.  So the notion might be that a smaller number of paying readers rather than a big number who don't pay is actually a better offer to advertisers (I'm guessing here, because **** knows what goes on in yer man's mind).  But in any case it'd be doomed to failure. Only a tiny percentage of social media users would be willing to pay.

[Watt-Zeefuik]

On 19/09/2023 at 10:20, Ulysses said:

 

I know this may seem like an odd question, but I'll ask it anyway.

 

Has he actually made such an arse of it?  I mean, aside from the fact that he paid too much for Twitter, what damage has he done?

 

He's managed to lose a lot of existing advertisers, but there's still plenty of advertising on my feed, including a fair number of well-known companies, which suggests that he's still got people willing to advertise.

 

Millions of people are moaning and complaining about X, or having a laugh at the bin fire it's turned into.  But who's actually left?  Everyone is still watching and still scrolling, with no real sign of diminishing viewing numbers - which is all that really matters for a service like Twitter.

 

It's shit, but despite all the nonsense it's showing no signs of getting any smaller.  And what's the alternative?

 

Making people pay is a big gamble, and I think it might be the thing that'll finish Twitter off, but so far I'm not 100% convinced that (from a marketing point of view) Musk is making as much of a bollix of this as we'd like to think.  It's a bit like Ryanair. We all hate them, but we still fly with them.

It's pretty impossible to know for sure, because him taking it private meant that he didn't have to report accurate usage numbers to anyone any more.

 

However, anecdotally, I know a ton of people who have left (including myself). Others who are on it don't log in nearly as much as they used to. Advertisers and ad hosting firms have been reporting significantly lower hit rates coming from X, which is usually an indicator of lower traffic.

 

Journalists obviously have come to rely on it pretty strongly both for tips and for reporting, and a lot of them are still on it but are looking for an exit. This will speed that up substantially, IMO.

 

The biggest **** up he's made IMO, though, is gutting the systems staff. I'm a former sysadmin so this is kind of personal to me, but it's going about how I'd expect it to. If you have good sysadmins, the day after you fire them all you should basically notice no change at all, because if they were doing their jobs right they'd have already thought of all the things that could go wrong and put in fixes and automation to cover for them. However, the longer things go, the more likely you are to see things fall apart. So Twitter outages have started to become more common and the site is getting slower and less responsive. What comes next will be at some point in the next year or so, some major part of the site will fall over completely and it will take days to get back online. And then that will start happening more frequently, and even if Musk hires back double the number of admins he fired, it will take months to get things back to where they would have been had he just kept his staff. Kind of like the RAAC stuff in buildings -- you can ignore it for a while and it's totally fine up until it's suddenly not fine and there's absolutely no way to fix it quickly or without a ton of money.

 

As to alternatives, I'm on the Fediverse (Mastodon) and it's okay but not great, although the usage continues to grow pretty steadily. BlueSky and Threads are decent alternatives I guess but Threads is run by a CEO who's almost as up his own arse as Musk is and BlueSky will probably just replicate all the problems Twitter had before Musk took over. I'm not sure there will be a site just like Twitter in the long run. Online advertising just doesn't pay what it used to and I'm not sure it ever will again, so these giant ad-based pure social media networks are probably a thing whose era is coming to an end.

[Ulysses]

^^^^

As far as I can see, people just use the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads to say how awful Twitter is. But if they've left Twitter, how do they know?

[XB52]

I'm on threads now but still pop in to twitter now and again. No way would I ever pay for it and I doubt very much many would

[indianajones]

24 minutes ago, XB52 said:

I'm on threads now but still pop in to twitter now and again. No way would I ever pay for it and I doubt very much many would

 

Is threads actually popular? I dont have it but it seemed to die a death pretty quickly. 

[XB52]

9 minutes ago, indianajones said:

 

Is threads actually popular? I dont have it but it seemed to die a death pretty quickly. 

It's no where near as many members as X but it's started from nothing just a couple of months ago

[Dusk_Till_Dawn]

14 hours ago, indianajones said:

 

Is threads actually popular? I dont have it but it seemed to die a death pretty quickly. 

It was an attempt to pounce on the last omnishambles at Twitter. It worked to an extent but after the early flurry, a lot of people have stopped using it again 

[Mikey1874]

Poor Elon. So sensitive. For him hopefully getting mental health support.