Episode 2 just dropped: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666928190445477890

5.2 MM views in 1 hour, although I understand there are very valid reasons to not consider that number precise. Even a fraction of that is huge and I think even the most anti-Tucker of Leftist agitprops would have trouble arguing that anything mainstream media puts out tonight will beat this clip.

Genius CEOs thought Fed money printer and covid were forever too.

You’re not a genius CEO. If the experts get it wrong all the time (and spend a ton of effort promoting what they “do right” to shape perception) why believe you saying 2 successful vids is a lasting trend?

Social media has exposed there is a depressing number of easily titillated by big numbers rubes in the world.

Lindy effect, Goodharts Law; the last 60-70 years are an outdated af zeitgeist to perpetuate.

I agree that Twitter is far from dead but you’re choosing a bad example.

> The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.

So anyone that had the (auto playing) video in view for two seconds as they scrolled through their feed. Multiplied by the number of times it’s in their feed. It’s a pretty meaningless number.

How about:

> 845.9K Likes

> 237.6K Retweets

In a day and a half for a ten minute video of a guy in his basement talking. It isn't even a video platform.

But what is the argument here? 237k retweets is a lot, sure. This tweet from 2020 has 883k retweets and is just four photos:

https://twitter.com/BTS_twt/status/1296701109340237824

So does 237k retweets in 2023 mean the network is as vital as it was in 2020? I have no idea what basis this argument is being made on.

Does it mean Twitter is dead though? That's the basis of this thread.

That’s exactly my point. A tweet with 237k retweets was thrown out as a evidence that it’s not dead but I’m asking on what basis 237k is a lot or not a lot.

Given how easy it is to have bot farms promote tweets I don't think this is a valid metric to use

If you think that’s bad, wait until you hear how they measure broadcast and cable television viewership.

What does that have to do with Twitter’s popularity, though?

How

Putting aside the dubious methodology behind that metric, I’d like to point out that’s precisely the wrong metric to be paying attention to. You need to look at the traffic and retention numbers of the power users, and better yet the critical users in the social graph. Power user traffic has declined 25% since Elon.

The reason why this number is more important than overall user growth, is because social networks don’t decline, they chug along, until the collapse all at once, like a bridge with a key support knocked out. By studying the collapse look of Friendster, MySpace, Snap (which technically still exists), this predictor of collapse has been identified.

So yeah Twitter is dead. The rest of the network just doesn’t know it yet.

See:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/twitters-top-users-are-posti... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29196654/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6109

Twitter exists because of celebrities, politicians, journalists, musicians, etc. And those users have largely not migrated to Mastodon. Maybe you could argue they're promoting more on Tiktok now, but that's a bit of a different platform.

BLACKPINK and Taylor Swift both tweeted today. So did Barack Obama, and Stephen Curry. And CNN, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News are all constantly updating their Twitter feeds.

Meanwhile the big Mastodon draw is... Kathy Griffin? And her last Mastodon toot was... March 31. Guess she got bored of only getting 100 likes per post.

The big Mastodon draw is getting away from Twitter and its bullshit.

People who are only interested in virality and clicks and drawing as large an audience as possible are welcome to stay away.

You seem to be confused. I didn’t say Mastodon is going to replace Twitter. I literally said, “Twitter is dead,” and then laid out why the collapse has already started. This shouldn’t be controversial. Twitter has been losing users for years now.

Celebrities aren’t trendsetters. They’re laggards. To use the hockey metaphor, they always skate to the puck, not where it is going. Case in point: Every band was on MySpace until well after the collapse began.

Do you really trust those numbers?

Twitter has all the inventive in the world to artificially inflate view counts and have done similar, sketchy things recently[0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...

Poor Tuck is doing a Twitch channel now?!