Twitter stats show great growth in musk related topics (space, EV's, etc), but a decline in the amount of content posted in nearly all other areas.

Where are you seeing these stats?

Here, for example: https://twitter.com/stats_feed/status/1666446359619153920

how does this backup what you said in anyway? all I'm seeing is follower growths for popular accounts

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertis... : more than half their advertisers quit.

A quick browse around twitter shows they have plenty of adverts to show.

They may be selling that ad space for pennies on the dollar... But they are managing to fill it.

The owners want money, not the pleasure of seeing ads.

Maybe so, but Reddit is not Twitter; API access is far more important for Reddit because its official client is garbage and can't handle the long-form content that Reddit is known for.

This will have outsized implications for the 1% of users who actually post the content the other 99% come to see in a way that Twitter (and its 280-character comment limitation) does not.

> can't handle the long-form content that Reddit is known for.

Isn’t Reddit widely known for memes by the public?

I don't think so? That's more 4chan AFAIK.

Most people have no problem with the official app. They simply don't care enough even if they acknowledge the drawbacks. We are not representative.

> The very same thing hardly seems to have hurt Twitter.

It has. As somewhat of a Twitter addict, I'm finding it much easier not to log on these days, because the experience and the conversations have really hollowed out. I'm also no longer seriously considering using Twitter for promoting any projects or anything of the like going forward.

To generalize, Twitter relies on celebrities for traffic.

Reddie relies more on genuine content and less personal brand (as you are subbed to subreddits and not public users, mostly)

Reddit also relies on thousands of hours a day worth of free moderation. If the moderation quality drops, then reddit will really go down hill.

If Digg is of any indication, it takes a series of negligent and greed-driven actions to scuttle a social media platform, but it is possible.

Reddit has been more or less re-inventing itself for their asinine IPO aspirations, and in doing so it has moved to closed source code, redesigned their interface, adjusted content policies to court advertisers, and now they're finally going after the crowd of enthusiasts who depend on features that Reddit has failed and/or declined to implement.

This all reeks of venture capitalist sabotage and it's the very thing that ultimately killed off Digg.

Personally, when someone mentions tweets nowadays, my first impulse is to ridicule / discount it all - "what, are you seriously using a service Elon bought to promote far-right topics...?"

Typically it comes out of my mouth in a more moderate stance, like "sorry, I don't use Twitter anymore. Any chance you could link a better forum?"

The most charitable reading of your comment still leads one to question what you would consider the right if Elon is far right. I am pretty sure he is a moderate leaning both ways on differing topics.

That's not what the parent wrote though. They were Elon is promoting the far right.

I see the disconnect that you are pointing out but I did mean to address his point with his response rather than take the focus from his actions to him directly.

The point still stands though, how is he promoting the far right? I understand the far right to be organizations and individuals who have no affiliation with or acknowledged support from the registered political organizations of Republicans, but whom still chose the Republicans to support because they believe that side of the political divide to be more likely to produce results that they would be happy with.

For example StormFront (or whatever the current Nazi organizations go by) which I would expect to be receiving no support from Elon, Twitter, or anyone affiliated with the national, state, or local Republican parties. An example from the far left would be NABLA (or whatever the current pedophile organizations go by) which I would expect to be receiving no support from Elon, Twitter, or anyone affiliated with the national, sate, or local Democrat parties.

He is for sure far right. He's against increasing taxes on the wealthy, vowed to lobby against transgender health care, endorsed Republicans in the midterms, launched Desantis's campaign, and constantly rails against woke culture. There is not an ounce of left in this guys body.

I seriously question the motives of people saying this guy is a "moderate." You cannot gaslight America into thinking the far-right is middle of the road.

I don't care what he "is" or might be; his actions objectively helped the far-right. Whether he did it to troll, to "restore" some imaginary "balance", or because he genuinely believes in far-right topics, he still very materially helped far-right speech - and he clearly did it on purpose.

Umm,? Their ad revenue is down north of 50% since the 'garch took over. How are you defining 'hurt'?

UPDATE: Oh I see, they did the kill-the-API-to-kill-third-party-clients thing before too, long before the current brouhaha. OK, never mind.

No the kill the API thing came after Elon. It was one of the things he did, but indeed this specific thing does not seem to have hurt user engagement in particular. In fact it was probably one of the things that was good for their ad revenue and probably why they did it.