[minimaxir]

Unlike previous attempts for groups of people trying to leave Twitter/X post-Elon acquisition for a competitor social network but failed due to the difficulty of getting all their friends to also switch, this time it might actually stick.

Even before the election results on Tuesday, the vibes on X have been steadily been getting worse from my perspective, and the fact that Musk will get more power and influence from a Trump win may have been its Digg 2.0 moment.

I have replaced my Twitter contact information in my HN profile with my Bluesky contact info, and will be doing the same on my personal website soon.

[bsimpson]

As someone who was on Reddit when we got the influx of Digg users, it's wild that "Digg moment" is now an anachronistic culture reference like "Betamax" or "jumping the shark" was for me when I was younger.

I'm sure there's a huge cohort of people active here have never heard of Digg except that it was a thing that fumbled and made Reddit bigger.

[infotainment]

Ehhh, at this point people have been predicting the downfall of X/Twitter for so long such predictions feel a bit meaningless.

Twitter was always terrible and I was hopeful Elon’s mismanagement would finally destroy it, but I think its clear that its never going anywhere.

[dawnerd]

it was never going to die overnight though. It's had a steady decline since the takeover.

[mike_hearn]

Musk is claiming that it recently reached record usage highs, as measured by "user seconds". It's a bit unclear whether he is counting X as a different platform to Twitter though, and "user seconds" is pushed upwards by video content that takes longer to consume. But usage hasn't obviously declined since the takeover either.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854777813464662307

[johneth]

I always assume the worst possible interpretation of any numbers falling out of Elon's mouth.

[rsynnott]

Hint: when people start using a weird metric that no-one has ever hard of before, they are generally doing so because real metrics are, ah, less favourable.

For the ultimate example, see WeWork’s old ‘community adjusted EBITDA’, which was pretty much just revenue.

[mike_hearn]

I don't think it's that weird assuming it's defined in the obvious way. Such a metric is obviously harder to game than MAU or similar as it's less affected by occasional users who don't really use the site but click through links from time to time. It also seems more aligned with what advertisers care about (how many seconds are spent looking at ads).

[threeseed]

Fidelity who invested in X have said it's worth 20% since Musk took over.

So it definitely is dying. It will just take another year or two.

[AnthonyMouse]

Musk overpaid for Twitter. That doesn't mean it's dying any faster than incumbent social media platforms do in general.

Someday Twitter will be AOL, but so will TikTok and Facebook and all the rest of them, because nothing lasts forever.

People who think it's going to die immediately are just hoping that it will, but that's generally not how it works. They die when something else replaces them, and even once the thing arrives the replacement takes quite a long time.

[threeseed]

Fidelity has downgraded X by 80% in 2.5 years.

And X has competitors in Bluesky and Threads both of which have seen record user numbers and growth. For example, Threads has grown to 275m MAU in 1.5 years.

There is no reality in which X should be remotely compared to any of the other major social media platforms. It is failing at an unprecedented rate and based on user growth in Bluesky/Threads is continuing to rapidly decline.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Fidelity has downgraded X by 80% in 2.5 years.

Hence overpaid.

They've also lost advertisers, which is obviously bad for Fidelity but not all that relevant to the people using it. And it's not clear to what extent that has any staying power because companies get a one-time story written about them when they do the initial announcement and soon they're back to wanting to run ads everywhere they can because running ads that reach a different user base gets them otherwise-unavailable sales.

> And X has competitors in Bluesky and Threads both of which have seen record user numbers and growth. For example, Threads has grown to 275m MAU in 1.5 years.

Threads is Facebook. It has users because Facebook is pushing it with both financial resources and the network effect of an incumbent social network, and even then it has fewer users than Facebook itself and its users are disproportionately converts from Facebook/Instagram rather than Twitter because that's where it's being pushed.

Bluesky has like 7M users. It's the sort of thing that could replace Twitter, in ten or twenty years.

> There is no reality in which X should be remotely compared to any of the other major social media platforms.

It has hundreds of millions of active users.

> It is failing at an unprecedented rate and based on user growth in Bluesky/Threads is continuing to rapidly decline.

Musk changed some things and a small percentage of people left, many of them performatively because they later came back. Network effects are strong.

[minimaxir]

With Trump winning the election, X will either be merged into Truth Social or nationalized.

[asdf123wtf]

Surprised to see few grappling with this reality. Twitter is like state affiliated social media now. What real barriers can remain between anyone's twitter data and a hostile state regime that's promised to abuse it's power to target it's opposition? It's actually horrifying.

And to the extent that Elon believes Twitter was useful in attaining his current position, it doesn't really matter if it's profitable on the balance sheets or not - it's a loss leader.