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.
Loving that big social media sites are screwing themselves over. Burn it all down.
Hoping Reddit is next lol 🙌
If Facebook still exists, Reddit and Twitter are likely too big to fail too. They might not make what they used to at their peak, but as long as the site isn’t fully abandoned they’ll get their revenue
Twitter’s true value is at least hidden behind a billionaire firewall. It won’t die until him and his foreign backers are sick of bleeding money.
When Reddit goes public, all will be known about the company in a way that’s never happened before.
True, Reddit will probably not fail, but becoming a worse place for everyone may still hurt them, and Reddit could lose so much goodwill that it could hurt the “organic” growth of their site. And if good alternatives like Lemmy thrives, I wouldn’t care as much.
Yeah I share your sentiment… unrelated but I love your profile picture!
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.
My favorite feature not many people know of is that you can follow hashtags! This is by far the best way to get content on Mastodon.
How do I see all the hashtags that I could follow? I’ve been trying searches and I’m not hitting the right keywords yet.
nm- I’m dumb. I typed in rpg for instance and hit the return key instead of seeing the option to do to the hashtag. Doh!
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
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.
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
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.
Hey thanks for explaining this. Twitter’s not something I ever warmed to and still look at people with confusion when they use it. Like artists, there is a crazy work pressure for academics to get noticed. To the point of cruelty sometimes. It makes sense that Twitter would work because, like you said, it works well-enough and has a low barrier to entry.
Exactly; Twitter and all the rest of the commercial social media sites trap a bunch of people who are all trying to get money out of each other, convinced that if they aren’t there and part of the ongoing spectacle, they’re missing out on business. Everyone else is there just to be a mark. Money pulls the strings and the puppets lurch about.
Whatever professional interests one has in it, I don’t think there are many valid human reasons.
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
“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.
