Canceling third party clients and the antics, as well as the bad management of Musk is what people drives away from Twitter not the reliability.

Has Twitter’s usage declined?

I’ve seen a lot of opinions like this but they seem to be motivated reasoning and/or summarization of the views of a small echo chamber, but not based on actual data.

I would guess most users of social media (and products/services for that matter) are not too concerned with antics of the owners.

Twitter is a worse experience for me today than it was before Musk purchased the company. I don't need to even be aware of his antics for that to be true. Killing Tweetbot is the biggest issue for me. The official iOS app is awful so now I never check Twitter from my phone. Plus my timeline isn't as interesting because lots of people I follow simply stopped posting. Maybe they left due to Musk's antics, but it makes my experience worse even if I don't care about Musk.

It seems pretty inarguable that some people are using the site less. I'm one. In order for overall usage to remain the same, there needs to be people making up for that. Do these people exist? Who is using the site more because of Musk? I'm honestly not sure, because if they do exist, I don't follow them.

This anecdote is the answer to the lack of data that would support the user count decline of Twitter? I'm sorry to damage your ego but you're just a single data point and extrapolating how you see things to a non-quantifiable amount of other users isn't a reasonable argument.

I didn't say it was an answer to a lack of data. That was the reason I asked for anecdotal data that runs counter to my experience. No one outside of Twitter is going to have actual data on this and I'm not sure if we should even trust any data coming out of Twitter at this point considering Musk's reputation.

And for the record, that anecdote is not a single data point. It is a single statement based off my observations of the hundreds of accounts I follow. My timeline is less active. That isn't because I use the site less. It is because cumulatively the accounts I follow are using the site less.

Is there a single major service from a Silicon Valley internet company that doesn't get worse by the year? They all loss lead for years and years, then try to diminish the experience for profit in late stages.

> It seems pretty inarguable that some people are using the site less. I'm one. In order for overall usage to remain the same, there needs to be people making up for that. Do these people exist? Who is using the site more because of Musk? I'm honestly not sure, because if they do exist, I don't follow them.

I'm using the site more now. Japanese twitter feels a lot more natural and nicer than it did pre-Musk.

That's interesting. What has Twitter done recently to improve the experience of Japanese users?

Trending topics have shifted. Allegedly they removed some manually-curated trending system that was previously in place, which may have been a system that worked well for some demographics but wasn't working great for Japan.

That is mildly surprising. I would have assumed a manual process would have done a better job of adapting to different languages and cultures than an automated process unless that manual work was done by people outside that cultural context.

I hear that they were manually pushing political tweets which I guess Japan doesn't hate engage with as much as people in the west do.

As someone that never really used twitter before, but deleted my account when the musk drama reminded me I had one... The only difference is now I hear more people complaining about twitter being down, features being broken, search being broken, number of likes/retweets being broken, etc... but those people still use twitter and still send me links to tweets that I don't bother to read.

Personally, I don't use twitter because I don't like it - and the recent changes make me dislike twitter even more than I did before. I wish more people would walk the walk when they talk the talk. Heheh.

I like reddit because it's like a very popular forum with subforums on gazillions of different topics, and there's a lot of stuff I enjoy on there because of that.

I don't understand how using reddit vs twitter is a political decision (in most use cases). They are completely different tools.

>Who is using the site more because of Musk?

Ironically, probably musk haters.

I had a coworkers who probably despised Trump as much as Hitler, but she literally couldn't stop herself from doom scrolling his twitter account.

You don't need to make the app better to get more users, just increase engagement even if it's through the power of contempt. Just look at news channels that are always trying to make people angry.

i've seen a wave of people looking to migrate to masterdon or some alternative, but those messages have slowed, and those who have "migrated" haven't stopped tweeting on twitter either.

The network effect is real, so without substantial change, twitter is still the best platform for tweeting.

> Has Twitter’s usage declined?

Literally nobody outside of Twitter knows. As it's no longer a public company, they're under no obligation to share any metrics.

My guess would be it increased until the end of 2022 (people were interested in how it's gonna turn out and more importantly World Cup was happening), but I'd be shocked if the usage didn't drop dramatically as 2023 rolled in.

Sample of one confirming your theory. I created an account and start using it to follow Musk as I thought he was some evil genius and loved to follow him and hate him.

I lost interest after a while when I realised he is of average intelligence with lots of emotional issues and just a crazy amount of money.

Haven’t logged in to Twitter for more than a couple of months now. Must not forget to delete my account at some point.

Interestingly Musk made it more transparent by introducing view count to every tweet so a simple solution might be to gather stats for the top 1000 users and each new tweet after 48 hours or so. Combine it into a trendline going forward. Under the assumption that the numbers are real but considering how many people that hate him, it would be a bold move to fake them and not expect to get caught.

I don't have any hard metrics to prove it, but most notable people in InfoSec (that I follow, anyway) moved off Twitter to infosec.exchange late last year. It's probably the case that individual "communities" of Twitter users have migrated off the site to a greater or lesser extent.

Twitter has put up those huge, ugly picture ads on comment and search feeds. Those ads are everywhere now. I think they risk annoying users with too many ads.

And yet, Twitter remains quite popular

I like to separate my politics from my technology.

So did digg.com for some time after the redesign.

digg.com, noe that's a name I haven't heard in a long time

zombo.com !

Not to mention Musk just being a ghoul in general. Mocking the disabled is something I can't let go.

Did he know the person was disabled when he made the comment?

Yes but it doesn't matter.

Yes

He said no. He said he wasn’t aware of all the information and also had been given some incorrect information on top of that. He tweeted this, of course and met to apologize and order to keep him on. So no, not yes.

Also things reddit has been doing for a decade.

It's interesting comparing the relatively calm discussion here to Reddit being down for hours (and still down as I type this) to the hyperbolic comments people were making about the death of Twitter when Twitter briefly had some issues the other day[1] (the site wasn't down but had some issues, and they were resolved in less than an hour).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35043433

Reddit isn't really used as "defacto source of breaking news". I mean, local subreddits and other things stiff get prompt information, but it doesn't get as much wide coverage as Twitter.

Well it was for a while. Then they got someone killed during the whole Boston thing. So you know, theres that..

What? They didn't get anyone killed.

Sunil Tripathi committed suicide, and while missing was named as one of the Boston bombers by a bunch of Reddit detectives leading to harrassment of his family, but I don't think the suicide was a result of being misidentified.

I think that's where the GP's mistake originated, though, since there was a public misidentification of someone who committed suicide.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

Reddit was never on the level of Twitter in terms of real-time news relevancy. Tweets are broadcast on television and used as sources for news stories constantly.

Would the world care if HN died suddenly? Almost no one would even notice.

Reddit is really little different from HN; it's just bigger.

Reddit also wasn’t just the subject of a ton of understandable attention and skepticism about how the site would continue to operate.

It has actually gotten a lot better. Incremental progress for a few years and we're in a fairly good place. This is highly unusual.

> It has actually gotten a lot better.

Come on, almost every evening you get error pages. Yes they don't last more than a few refreshes, but it's simply ridiculous for a site as prominent as Reddit.

> almost every evening you get error pages

The only thing I do more than Reddit is sleep - and I do not get error pages everyday. A few years ago, yes. Now they are pretty rare. Maybe once a week.

> The only thing I do more than Reddit is sleep

No offense, but... you okay? How do you take care of your brain while doing something like that?

It's hard for me to tear myself away fully from social media (behold this comment), but every time I do, I notice how my brain seems to just... work better.

If you were me, you may not consider yourself to be ok.

To give a simple explanation: I'm an extreme loner. Reddit is my human connection. I've been doing it for many years. I don't like it or dislike it, it just is. I'm content. Thanks for your concern.

What are your favorite subs?

sports subreddits. r/nba, r/nfl, my teams.

my city subreddit

r/chess + r/anarchychess (chess memes)

crypto subreddits

ya, those are the main ones. then all sorts of randoms. r/ProtonMail is a good random one.

Yeah I find local city subs pretty great.

Yeah, that's fair. I've been indexing high on solitude for a while (especially post-pandemic) and am actively working on re-prioritizing that these days.

> I don't like it or dislike it, it just is.

Now that's a level of Zen I can aspire to. :)

I’ve had much better experience after I switched back to the classic reddit page. Still occasionally has issues. But not nearly as bad as the default page. Maybe once every couple of weeks, I’ll get the reddit is broken page for a minute or two.

ah, i should have noted i never switched to or really tried new reddit. perhaps that has issues. old reddit has gotten very solid over time.

I’ve never experienced that and use reddit far too much.

When do you use it? Around 6-8PM GMT is prime time because both EU and US are active.

Nope.

On Reddit?

The past couple days have been the first error messages in years.

It used to be monthly

I feel like Reddit is more read heavy and Twitter is more write heavy. If you're trying to read Reddit and it's down, you'll probably go read it some other time (/r/all doesn't change that frequently). If you're trying to tweet news or something, there is no way to do that when Twitter is down.

Probably just the way you use them? You Tweet and lurk Reddit?

All user generated content is read heavy. Most people just lurk. Twitter publishing view counts is demonstrating this clearly. You'll get 3 likes, 2 comments, and 400 views.

I agree with the sentiment I expect 10x as many reads as writes.

Just thought I’d mention that Twitter’s exposed view count is not indicative of actual views from users. You can get hundred of views on a private account with a handful of followers.

Are there any Twitter lurkers? I never created Twitter account and the only time I visit it is if there's some news article or someone mentions specific tweet in social media.

From what I see, Twitter is just a tool for narcissists, and they absolutely need to write to exist.

Check the view counts that they now publish. Every Tweet has orders of magnitude more views than likes, comments or retweets. Those are all of the lurkers.

Perhaps people are too young or too old to remember the Fail Whale before Twitter got reliable =)

Reddit's reliability used to be much much worse than its early days.

These days it's not perfect but far from awful.

It's still worse than Twitter's.

Depends what you're using it for, I guess.

It is actually hilarious. People would rather wait for Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc to get back online than to sign up to another alternative social network.

It means that the network effect is still present on the site such that it is not worth it for existing users to migrate and start from zero again to a lesser known platform with low discoverability or little to no activity. Especially one with a significantly weaker network effect.

It would have to take more than just outages to damage the network effect of these social networks. Hence why alternatives like Mastodon, didn't take off as many here thought.

Mastodon has two big problems. It's not just the network effect but also educating the users on how to use a federated social network. It's easy with a technical background to overestimate how easily people will understand that, let alone care about it.

Here's mainstream news trying to get people onto Mastodon, and even this is in the "tech" section: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-r...

A good client shouldnt make you care

That's entirely a tech problem, rather than a people problem

Is there a service that matches my curated list of subjects as well as Reddit does?

Reddit successfully killed most if not all web forums, and reigns supreme over that. Nothing even comes close; but some twitter/discord groups might be the beginning of the end.

I don't understand either of those. With twitter there's no room for thought or nuance. It's just a basic "hot take" and that's it. Sure, Reddit is full of those, but there's some depth there too at times. I understand discord even less. When I look at it it seems like just a giant chat log. I can't easily find new insights from overnight without rewinding the whole log and parsing it all. I don't know how to pick and choose topics that interest me, it's a fire-hose of noise. I assume one can do it, but I can't figure it out.

I disagree about your view on Twitter. I'd even go as far as saying it's better than Reddit for nuance because going against the pack doesn't cause you to be downvoted into obscurity. It allows more than one view. It's great for interacting directly with the researcher that did an interesting study or the developer who released a new software.

The common issue for all of the services are when they become mainstream. It attracts bad apples. Twitter used to be and still have some great interactions just like small subreddits do, but when a post reaches /r/all or the feed of a controversial celebrity, you know it's going to be awful.

Discord is more like IRC used to be. It thrives in small communities of 30-50 people where you talk regularly and each topic has its own channel so regular chitchat doesn't drown out the interesting bits. It's more of a daily pub talk with your friends than finding a tutorial 10 years after it was written.

Yeah they’re both quite far from a forum, but people often abuse them to be something similar. Nothing close to what Reddit has (or even hacker news)

Not one that's widely used. I made something small where you only see links reposted by friends, so you can get stuff from all over the place, but only if it's filtered through a friend. Which is even more granular than Reddit's curation and also obviates the need for community moderators.

I've found discord replaces some Reddit subs on my list now.

How do you consume it? I find it's like trying to read a chat log - very hard to seperate high quality signal from noise.

That's true, I'm a fast reader and I am probably on lower volume boards than you might be thinking of.

When you come back after a day or two away do you start reading where you left off like a chat log?

For the topics that interest me I do. Some I just scroll a few new messages.

I've honestly gone to Facebook groups nowadays. I don't love the company, but it does seem to be one of the last places I can find fellow nerds of my specific niche interests.

Hell, Twitter's reliability has been atrocious for a long time.

It's tempting to want to blame the admins or political bias...the main problem are the mods for individual subs. Too much domain and keyword filtering, arbitrary removals of content, algorithmic removals/filtering, etc. The whole point of moderating is to actually moderate, not remove stuff automatically all the time. Even content that gets up-voted and users like, will not uncommonly be removed for no reason. If they don't want to moderate, they should be removed by the admins and replaced by new moderators who will. The tendency as time goes on is for subs to become increasingly moderated and censored to the point of being useless.

One of the most interesting things about Reddit is how they’ve managed to grow Reddit, Inc to a few thousand employees, but everyone still refers to the company as “the admins,” as if it’s a rag tag community group, not a Twitter-sized company.

Well every subreddit is run by a small group of despots. So I would expect that's who they are talking about in a sense.

No, the 'admins' are people who work for reddit. 'Mods' are people who volunteer to work for reddit (the 'despots'). By the way, you should try modding a moderately large sub and see what you have to deal with. It is always easy to criticize until you are one having to do the work.

I don't think people make that distinction in their lived felt experience. Mods == Reddit.

Unless it's changed completely since I bolted from there a couple years ago, they absolutely do. Anyone who had been using the site for more than a few weeks generally understood the difference.

That sites been eternal Septembered multiple times, to the point it's almost entirely unrecognisable. Reddiquitte isn't even a thing anymore, they now have "policies" and "codes of conduct".

I wouldn't be shocked if the meta has changed to call anyone with powers "admins" now.

It hasn't, but then again reddit is huge, and it is easy to wall yourself off from most of it if you try hard enough, which I have.

if you're the only one filling a void, people forgive a lot.

reddit is the place at the moment for a lot of people, that affords them a lot of forgiveness.

Correct, reddit has been up and down pretty regularly and has had its own share of problems like the irritating web interface and the nagging to user their iOS/Android app. Twitter had a terrible time coping with growth in the 2010s and the "fail whale" became a bit of a meme, but that died down as they got a hold of how to handle hockey-stick growth. Suddenly we're seeing that a bit more frequently. Weird, that!

It's interesting how this line has shifted after the layoffs from:

1. actually it'll be fine, they had too many staff. nothing will change.

2. actually it's broken because Twitter "1.0" sucks, is brittle and is unsustainable. we need to throw out their garbage code.

3. actually it's ok to have downtime, it worked for the guys who have a less than a quarter of the active users we do [0][1] who also have a year-on-year decline in users!

I guess I'm gonna have to answer the "you just hate Twitter/Elon" thing - look I would've been happy if Twitter carried on as-is, even if Elon let his politically active pals back on the site again. But they dumped Tweetbot, I don't like Twitter's app, I found I liked Ivory + a bunch of people on Mastodon so :shrug: maybe Twitter isn't for me any more. No biggie.

[0] - 237 million/day, https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily...

[1] - 50 million/day, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324264/reddit-daily-act...