[shiroiushi]

Twitter was overstaffed, but much of the "extra" staff the elon fired weren't SREs keeping the systems running, they had to do with things like moderation. Elon doesn't believe in moderation, so out they went, and the skeleton crew was able to keep the site running, for the most part, but now the user experience has gone to hell unless you're a right-wing nutcase, so everyone who isn't is fleeing, as well as advertisers who Twitter even threatened to sue because they weren't buying advertising (!).

[instagraham]

a lot of what made X worse since Musk is not easily quantifiable. fewer high-quality posts, much higher spam, next to zero moderation, more misinfo - while it's possible to get some data on this, it's subjective enough that the fans will wave it away.

the problem is that Twitter has been such an invaluable part of the daily doomscroll that i suspect even those who have 'left' it for BlueSky or Threads are still opening X a few times a day - keeping those MAU numbers up.