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A comment on r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes. Parent comment

Re:r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit... by jonathankoren on Thursday June 08, 2023 @08:05PM (#36251158)
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

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Re:r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit... by mjr00 on Thursday June 08, 2023 @08:43PM (#36251551)
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.

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Re:r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit... by krapp on Thursday June 08, 2023 @08:50PM (#36251612)
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.

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Re:r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit... by jonathankoren on Thursday June 08, 2023 @10:40PM (#36252429)
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.

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