Twitter US ad sales plunged 59%, and internal forecasts are grim, NYT reports
NYT: Twitter "has regularly fallen short of its US weekly sales projections."
Loving that big social media sites are screwing themselves over. Burn it all down.
It boggles my mind that anyone, outside of the far-right lunatic fringe, is still on that platform. I left months before Elon Musk showed up, because they weren't doing enough to fight misinformation in 2020, and now it's an absolute dumpster fire. I can only guess there's something like the sunk cost fallacy at work here, and that's why people are reluctant to leave.
I keep finding myself on Twitter not by choice, but because it is the news outlet for a lot of individuals and other entities. Even if readers like me have largely moved on to other places, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all alternative for microblogging.
Just this last weekend we had weather events disrupting my local Pride festival, and Twitter was the only easy place that they were able to quickly distribute status updates. Bluesky is still in private beta, and Mastadon doesn't really work at all for this particular use-case.
Just this last weekend we had weather events disrupting my local Pride festival, and Twitter was the only easy place that they were able to quickly distribute status updates. Bluesky is still in private beta, and Mastadon doesn’t really work at all for this particular use-case.
oh yeah, that's the other part: it's an acceptable platform for everybody from 13-year old fangirls to the literal, actual president and his staff, and you can find everybody between those groups on the site. just very hard to displace that kind of universality, especially when everybody's already on one place
I've had a fairly good experience with Mastodon & bird.makeup for reading accounts still at Twitter.
I think a lot of reporters and bloggers got used to it too much and are now totally reliant on it to get their input for the quick articles. And as long as there are still people reading the Tweets and spreading the information, there always will be people making Tweets for easy publicity.
Most of my twitter engagement comes from links on reddit funny enough (usually sports related). There's still a few people im interested in following as well so i'll poke my head in here and there. But yeah i certainly don't blame people for leaving the platform entirely. I just try to steer clear of the toxic stuff (which is very tough if you spend longer than 5 minutes on it)
I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It's an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don't belong on twitter anymore. The only reason I can think of why they stay is because they are still convinced that one day they'll become famous. Twitter really seems to play on the idea that everyone can be a superstar. Sad really.
I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It’s an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don’t belong on twitter anymore.
for mid-level people in a space or community there's really not much better than twitter currently: it has--or, i suppose, had--a good equilibrium of random people and smart or influential people, a unique equilibrium of semi-privacy and public space, and a culture and barrier for entry that's low and overall decent for getting eyes on your work (to a point).
if you're an artist, for example? there's simply not a better platform for your work. dedicated gallery sites are fractal and don't have all the other stuff twitter comes with. (sometimes they don't even have all the art, to extend the example!) probably the closest mass-media to twitter that emulates the benefits is instagram, but instagram also has a different clientele and a very different culture.
There still isn't a great competitor for access to certain groups that I followed on Twitter (i.e. legal analysts and real time local news). Thankfully, many of them have migrated to Mastodon, but there is still a bit of a gap and a lot of people are still pointing back to Twitter. I blame inertia more than anything for those groups remaining and it will take some more time for them to fall off of the platform.
That all said, I left the platform after Musk started banning journalists and the flight tracker and I've not really missed it at all.
Exactly, I still use twitter because it is the best news aggregator for me personally. There is no other site where I can see updates from my favorite artists, authors, content creators, game companies... and it's all neat in one place with recommendations for similar content actually making some sense.
If you block politics and don't engage in the social aspect of it, twitter is a very useful tool. Nothing else comes close unfortunately, mastodon doesn't have anyone, tumblr has a few people and reddit is just second-hand news.
I hope it crashes and burns just so people actually move somewhere else, but that hasn't happened yet.
I remember around Novemeber trying to get my friends to use other platfrom but Twitter as I removed my account, made twitter account only to talk to them because their too lazy to even just use Discord.. it just so damn annoying
I left back in 2018 because using it on a regular basis is like taking a chainsaw to your brain. I only keep my account in order to keep track of a handful of nsfw artists, and even a lot of them moved back to old Web 2.0 infrastructure
“One of the incidents cited by ad executives was the spread of an AI-generated image that falsely suggested there had been a large explosion at the Pentagon.”
Sure do love it every time paid verification comes back to bite Musk in the arse.
Musk set a goal of making half of Twitter's revenue subscription-based, but his revamped Twitter Blue subscription service got off to a slow start. As the NYT report said, reversing the decline in advertising "is crucial because ads have long made up 90 percent of the company's revenue."
Well it looks like he's well on his way to succeeding in that goal if the ad revenue keeps dropping
he never did say the profits had to increase for the goal to be achieved
Here's to hoping he succeeds lmao
The only thing I'm afraid of is that they'll turn it around before the majority truly understands how bad it is. It'll be just like COVID: the bad times won't last long enough for people to change. They'll just think "it's temporary" and not change a damn thing.
I have the same fear. There is some momentum on moving away from traditional profit-oriented outrage-dependent social media and moving to decentralized technology.
The movement needs succeed to some extent and that traffic needs to move to Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. And for that to happen, Twitter and Reddit (add Facebook for good measure) need to cause a significant exodus to other platforms.
I just hope it isn't another Whatsapp -> Signal migration which failed to cause a significant shift in the end.
It's almost like this Musk guy isn't as capable as his fanboys would have you think. Are there still Musk fanboys?
He will probably attract the Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate fans if he hasn't already.
The problem: I logged back in to mastodon today and it's dead af. I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong or is just not used at all.
Mastodon doesn't push content into your face, you get only what you ask for: the people and hashtags you follow. One caveat is that hashtag follow works much better if you are on a larger instance with more users and their follows pulling in more posts for a given hashtag.
For a specific example I am on mastodon.social and I follow a handful of individuals and a few hashtags (#boardgames and #emacs are probably the biggest ones) and I see about 50-80 posts a day which is plenty for me, especially if I dig into their threads.
Honestly, I think Twitter and Reddit are both sinking ships. Both of them seem to be run by people who really don't know what they're doing. They kind of deserve it, to be honest.