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539 points donohoe | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Hoasi ◴[] No.44511157[source]
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
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mrweasel ◴[] No.44511712[source]
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.

The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.

The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.

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moomin ◴[] No.44512165[source]
I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
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mrweasel ◴[] No.44512222[source]
Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.
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jcranmer ◴[] No.44512716{4}[source]
The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.] per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported engagement.

I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.

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SV_BubbleTime ◴[] No.44513822{5}[source]
> The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers

Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.

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1. tristan957 ◴[] No.44515335{6}[source]
I've seen people report they get better engagement on Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter, based on percentages.
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2. SV_BubbleTime ◴[] No.44515508[source]
And I’ve seen people report the complete opposite. Both can be true. The reality is BlueSky pushed echo chambering even harder than X and it’s a dying platform - maybe those two things are unrelated but not for me they aren’t. Unless some miracle happens to reverse its trend, BlueSky already had its shot.
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3. tristan957 ◴[] No.44515801[source]
Luckily Blue Sky isn't the only competitor in the space, then.
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4. SV_BubbleTime ◴[] No.44526548{3}[source]
Yes, right.

There is mastadon - dead for mass market, threads - dead entirely.

How many times do people need to be told that network effects are really real?

5. api ◴[] No.44526583[source]
I have no interest in any of them. The Twitter-style format is inherently toxic and always devolves into a trolling competition or echo chambers. The short format prioritizes stupid takes that fit in a sentence or two over well thought out ideas.