Twitter’s traffic is taking a dive, according to Cloudflare’s CEO. - The Verge
Twitter’s traffic is taking a dive, according to Cloudflare’s CEO. - The Verge
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now. It’s, uh, not a great story! Twitter alternative Threads, meanwhile, has been ...
Turns out forcing people to use Twitter less makes people use Twitter less, what a discovery!
But have you considered paying $8 a month to use features that used to be free and also associate yourself with far right?
If you're still on Twitter, you're part of the problem. I don't care about your excuses.
Well look at me, I'm part of the problem.
Good! Hope to see the same stories about Reddit and other major social media platforms that have taken steps to prioritize profit over the community.
The users are your golden apple. Abuse them, the apple turns sour.
I thought the proverb was: cook a golden goose and you’ll eat for a day. Teach the golden goose to lay eggs and you’ll eat for a lifetime.
Gold is edible btw. Or at least inedible and non-toxic. It passes through without chemically reacting.
The fact that people who have paid get to have their replies appear first means that you see the people with the worst opinions (people who are fine with giving Musk money) most of the time, just makes it a very un-fun experience.
That's why I left. That's all I see on replies
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great. It isn’t advertising, or social manipulation, or exorbitant subscription fees and API charges. It isn’t restriction of speech or freedom of speech, it isn’t algorithmically controlled moderation and curation.
It is the people that make a social network great.
"What people? I see only consumers and products."
What consumers and products? I only see numbers on a spreadsheet going up and down!
They don't care about making a great or even good product. It's solely about making as much money in as short a time period as possible, regardless of the long term consequences.
I don't have access to Twitter's balance sheet, but I'd wager a guess that they're on financial life support in the short term, and they've got a stage 4 cancer diagnosis in the long term.
The only thing Twitter has going for them over a competitor like Mastodon or Threads, is their name. And Musk has made sure their name is covered in shit and mud.
Twitter was doomed before Musk bought them, and they're super doomed now.
It is the people that make a social network great.
You're right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It's the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.
Disagree. They know. It's just that they're trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform's interests are constantly at war with the user's interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.
Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.
Call it "enshittification": Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
While it is true, there are also some factors which make people converge on some platforms. Factors beyond simply presence of other people. Like technical features.
The biggest technical feature that draws users is the Interface. Twitter didn’t gain popularity (or even the Bird icon and “tweet” moniker) until Tweetie, Twitteriffic and eventually Tweetbot came along.
Reddit was just a website for (no offence intended) “neckbearded basement dwelling incels” until RiF and Apollo made it more accessible.
Mastodon usage soared when 3rd Party Twitter apps were killed and once once again when Ivory was released.
I didn’t even know about Lemmy until I heard @christianselig@mastodon.social and @gruber@mastodon.social mentioned it on The Talk Show. I didn’t start using it regularly until I discovered wefwef and Memmy.
You're not wrong about there being multiple factors, but I'd argue that this is often the least important factor. The technical features are easily replicated. (See: threads, stories, reels/tiktoks/shorts, etc.)
Network effects, on the other hand, have a stranglehold like no other.
You're on Facebook because your family's on there. You're on Twitter because your favorite meme pages are on there. You're on Instagram because the photographer you really like is on there. So on and so forth.
Here's the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
Wonder how much of it is because of Threads and how much of it is from making the site inaccessible without accounts and the rate limit.
Hard to tell. It's been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.
They removed the need for an account to view tweets not long after they implemented it.
As far as I know the rate limit is still in effect though.
On a side note: Why is this image (from Threads, don't know the version accessible on Twitter, as it's not accessible to me) a JPEG, and a very much compressed one, too? You see non-tech people sharing screenshot JPEGs all the time, but they are usually in okay quality and only degrade when shared and edited a lot. This one is basically unreadable from the beginning, and it's posted by a guy who studied computer science and leads a leading tech company since 14 years. Or is it really Threads transcoding and downgrading images so much?
In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it's the photo sharing community's microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.
EDIT: In the next meantime, Threads itself seems to be dead, at least the embeeded tweet (or thread, or whatever they call it) in the Verge article has been replaced by a "View on Threads" button which leads me to an absolutely blank page.
Instagram completely mangles image quality, and Threads seems to be tied into Instagram stuff on the back-end, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's happening here.
Good news everyone!
To the surprise of no one besides Musk, probably
I'm here for the schadenfreude, but it's horrible PR for Cloudflare to post the traffic graph of one of their customers tanking. And their CEO doing it, no less.
It's not a graph of their protection product(s), it's a graph from their DNS-service.
They don't get the Data from Twitter, they get it from the UsersI'm not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There's no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.
DNS Queries don’t care about your silly PR. DNS is king.
Twitter isn't their customer friends.
If I were Akamai, I'd be sure that my sales team knew to bring it up casually in conversation with every customer. Can't buy trust, have to earn it, and you can squander it all so easily.
