Over at New York, John Herrman tries to figure out what the heck Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. Along the way he notes this: "After bone-deep layoffs, the company is still bleeding talent."
That reminds me: When Musk took over Twitter he immediately fired half the employees, including an astonishing number of engineers. In the ensuing months, every time Twitter suffered an outage or a glitch of some kind it seemed like the whole world pounced. It was always a harbinger of what was to come as Twitter slowly deteriorated into unusability.
But it's now been more than a year and Twitter is.......fine? Sure, it's shedding advertisers like cat hair, but that's because of Musk's contempt for the things advertisers want. Operationally, Twitter seems to be running smoothly with a tiny fraction of the engineering staff it used to have. So what were all those engineers doing back in the pre-Musk era?
For what it's worth, I'll also repeat here something I've said repeatedly on Twitter itself: I don't really notice much difference since Musk took over. Lots of people are abandoning Twitter, but I can't quite figure out why. Maybe the decline of Twitter is more obvious if you follow lots of sketchy accounts? In my case, I follow only about 150 accounts and all of them are normal, sober feeds. I haven't been bombarded with trolls or bots or white nationalists or anything like that. Everything is pretty much the same as always.
I still have a hard time figuring out how Twitter survives if advertisers abandon it en masse because they don't need the grief, but otherwise it seems OK. Am I missing something?
People should stop using Xitter as a matter of principle.
Even if you don't see all the filth on it, it is spreading it around, and that is bad for everybody.
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See, but not everybody can attract views on OnlyFans. But I guess twin toddlers would play into some kind of fetish.
How about TwiX? Or eXTwitter?
I think it depends on how you use the platform.
The correct way, with a linear feed of accounts you choose to follow, is fine, except for the fact that a lot of accounts have bailed or majorly throttled their posting.
If you for some reason choose to use the algorithmic "For You" version, it does seem to be legitimately teeming with bad actors, spam, and blue check chuds.
Reply threads of individuals Tweets are similarly polluted, but again, I've never used Twitter as a social platform and never found replies particularly useful or compelling in the first place.
"The correct way, with a linear feed of accounts you choose to follow, is fine"
That's my experience with it and Facebook as well. Just see the feeds you're interested in and avoid the algorithm.
How do you do that on Facebook?
Having never used Twitter before, I'm not going to start now.
It's been broken for me since they throttled the number of posts you can see. I can't read a thread, I can't see replies, I can't read posts from a curated group, and I can't look up an author's news feed. So yeah, Twitter is nearly completely broken for the way I used it. The only thing I can see is a single direct-linked post and the "suggested" feed is full of trash posts.
I think this is key. Twitter is surviving because, in large part, it does a lot less than it did before. If you're not signed into Twitter, you can't see anything aside from the directly-linked tweet, which is extremely easy to cache and serve, but is also useless for basically all the interesting content posted to Twitter. Even then, they've had multiple serious global outages, and reliability and latency are both much worse than they used to be, for anyone who cares to track.
Doing less also means the site is doomed long-term. Twitter's growth depended on being interesting to those without an account. That's not true anymore, except as the place where Elon throws his tantrums.
I quit shortly after musk's purchase so i can't speak to any change in usability personally, but i certainly see lots of complaints on reddit that mirror those seen in news coverage. As far as the impact of layoffs, I imagine there probably was significant overstaffing, but also lots of people laid off were working on various aspects of moderation and content management which are gone now and make the site much less pleasant for most users but don't actually break the site. Maintaining basic site operations has probably gotten easier since usage has dropped and they don't seem to be releasing any significant new features that i've heard about. But remember when musk tried that last big video stream and the whole thing crashed.
Most annoying part of Twitter these days is the Paid Engagement Bait: blue-checked accounts either posting repetitive memes meant to be quote-tweeted (that irritating "swords guy" meme), or posting stuff that's clearly troll-posting to get an angry response or quote-tweet.
There's no way to turn off quote-tweets for an account, so you either have to mute the account you're following or continuously mute the engagement bait they're quote-tweeting to dunk on. I've done both.
Right after Musk's purchase, I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, soon after he banned Twitterific which was the only way I ever accessed Twitter (since 2007), I figured I'd check out some other social networks.
I am pleasantly surprised that Mastodon has been pretty amazing. It feels like Twitter in the early days -- at least w/r/t the tech nerds I follow.
I left Xitter in 2017, soon after Trump was elected. I was just bombarded with bots and despite efforts to block them it just became too much of a task so...bye!
similarly my personal experience of Twitter is that my own feed is not much changed, except for missing all the people who have left.
Muskox's recent decision to allow Alex Jones back on the Xitter may be the bridge too far though.
You can no longer read a thread if you're not logged in (important for articles and discussions!)
You can no longer read a public timeline in chronological order if you're not logged in (important for public service announcements)
You can no longer read a curated list in chronological order whether you're logged in or not (it defaults to 'for you' instead)
Increased harassment campaigns have been occurring,
moderation is much, much slower, often not at all.
There are more kissybots (check your likes and engagement)
And people use paid features to harass and spread misinformation and hate.
Seems pretty bad to me.
The only people saying Twitter is fine these days are Elon fanboys, Putin bots, and Kevin Drum. That's some company to keep.
I find the experience awful. There were no halcyon days of Twitter, but in the last year the service has degraded noticeably and irreparably.
I haven't deleted my account yet. There's one account (or maybe a few) that I actually need to follow. Nothing to do with politics. But the political discourse is now a complete train wreck, which was the objective for Musk and his Saudi backers all along. The purchase was never about making money. It was to derail a platform that liberals were finding useful for political communications. Mission accomplished.
Threads shows some promise. But it will take time. Things like the high-profile welcome to Alex Jones on Twitter will expedite the migration.
it is ok to check on people you follow but search sucks and there are more ads and terrible advertising
Man who barely uses Twitter doesn't see much different compared with earlier time when he barely used Twitter.
(That Thing You're Worried About? It Doesn't Bother Me, Kevin Drum, a long-running series)
or "man who barely uses twitter states his experience and then requests feedback from others to get more information and opinions".
Mr. Drum doesn’t support child porn himself, he just funds those who do! Hilarious.
I get a lot of wingnut bulletins clustering around Xits from Elon Musk, who I see whether I want to or not.
Also, a lot of the people I follow have left or post much less frequently.
I haven't tried any of the Twitter alternatives. Simply too feeble these days, and I don't have time for more than one such thing and I don't want to have to work out three of them.
If there were some kind of aggregator that could get them all at once, that would be great.
I'm one of those who left on principle rather than due to issues with my service.
I didn't follow it closely, but I think there were accounts before the purchase that Twitter was overstaffed and inefficient. However, firing 1/2 (or more) of your staff without doing much/any analysis of who to keep and why (which from all accounts Elon didn't do) seems like a terrible approach to management, no matter how bloated the company was. I suppose it says something that it hasn't completely crashed.
Was Elon lucky or brilliant in who he fired? I'm going with lucky, because he doesn't seem to have a great grasp of some of the site's core features or terminology, and because his inexplicable efforts to piss off advertisers more than undoes any benefit of his layoffs. They're still bleeding money.
Fewer people on the site surely reduces the workload for staff.
I completely quit Birdsite two months ago -- IOW I deleted my account. Up until then, I'd spend a few minutes a day scrolling through my lists.
POTUS and most politicians seem to have a Threads account, including Republicans. So, too, are almost all news outlets and many sports-related accounts. You can now access it on your desktop.
Mastodon is stacked with people not from the US, techies, geeks, non-conformists, arts/books lovers, and LGBTQ+. I've gotten way more engagement in the Fediverse in one year than I'd gotten in all the time I'd been on Birdsite.
I would challenge you on the problems of Birdsite. In the Fediverse, every disruption on Birdsite is mocked. It is extremely difficult to take down the whole Fediverse, given its distributed network.
When Threads finally attaches to the Fediverse, everyone in the Fediverse should technically be able to follow most accounts that used to be on Birdsite.
Long live the Fediverse.
Since Elon Musk, aka "the people's oligarch," took charge of Twitter, I have not noticed an influx of garbage content. But I curate my feed carefully. I like the feature where users can add context to a tweet. I don't like that; on average, some random person follows me once daily. It is always a chick with an attractive profile picture and a pinned tweet with a vacuous positive thought about life. I don't want to be followed by random users, and having to take the time to delete them is annoying. I sure it is some kind of bot thing and it did not happen under the previous ownership.
You are being followed by bots and because Musk has blocked free access to the API, it's too costly to constantly track the number of bots. But before he cut off API access, there was this:
One researcher did pay for access ($5000) and noted the increase, too:
Considering that Musk claims to have increased (m)onetizable (D)aily (A)ctive (U)sers even as people flee, it stands to reason that the growth comes from a massive increase in bots.
Elon M: Let's let Alex Jones back on! Hooray!
Kevin D: "Lots of people are abandoning Twitter, but I can't quite figure out why."
C'mon Kevin, this ain't hard!
I'll also repeat here something I've said repeatedly on Twitter itself: I don't really notice much difference since Musk took over.
Pretty much my experience, too. I noticed some increase in right wing assholerly before I recently quit the site, and those blue checks are annoying. But I didn't find it quite the 5th circle of Hell some are claiming.
I quit about three months ago mainly because it had become too much of a time-waster, and Musk's repellant nature made it all the easier to do so. I hope it changes ownership one of these days, because I miss it (though, again, it was a time waster for me).
"So what were all those engineers doing back in the pre-Musk era?" Let's face it Twitter is a pretty mature product that doesn't really need a lot of new features. Metaphorically they were assigning 8 assistants and a manager for them to each pregnant person in order to decrease pregnancy time down to a month.
I routinely experience the following glitches:
-Every post in feed gets compressed to show only username and the date 12/31/1969.
-Can't swipe through photos in post.
-"Can't retrieve tweets at this time."
When I unlocked my account to reply to someone recently, all my posts got likes from sex-bots. And of course all the ads seem to be for either scams or conservative causes, but I repeat myself. It was definitely a cleaner place under the ancien regime.
I left on principle (Musk wasn't paying software engineers what he had promised).
A month ago I tried X/Twitter at the same time as the Hamas attack. Various tweets and threads got me so riled up that I ejected rapidly. I don't need to waste my qi that way.
Mastodon is quiet and occasionally useful. It's like reading Reader's Digest back in the day.
I don't use Twitter because I don't want to hang out in a Nazi bar, and more importantly give the owner of the Nazi bar metrics he can use to say everyone loves Nazi bars.
Also why hang out in a Nazi bar when a new bar opened that gives you everything without the Nazis.
Twitter has way, way more spam than before Musk. My account now has dozens of followers, almost all of them spam.
Twitter has a massive broken link problem today. Could be the loss of engineers. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4358499-x-twitter-broken-link-issues/