The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.
So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.
On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.
I think it’s embarrassing how low that number is. If there are alien civilizations out there, I think humans would be at the bottom of the barrel intelligence wise.
It is probably like 50% of the users, the other 74% are bots that are still on the platform. lol
What percent did Reddit lose?
I’d be surprised if Reddit hasn’t recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn’t even a big sub.
I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.
Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.
Not all leavers join Lemmy, I’m pretty sure some just stopped and found other things to do with their life.
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Didn’t a lot of people who create content leave, though? 10k OPs is more important than 10k lurkers for Reddit.
If the content creators left Reddit, they certainly didn’t come here.
I don’t mean content creators necessarily, but people who post content.
Or at least beans.
I think it’s mostly wishful thinking unfortunately
Meh, whatever. Even if the fediverse were to never get any bigger, it’s still a win. This place is big enough to be stable and generate it’s own content and culture. All that matters is if you’re enjoying it here and actively trying to make it a better place.
Maybe for you but I miss interacting with actual developers, personalities or other content creators that post and respond on reddit or twitter. Mastodon and lemmy/kbin only get second hand crossposts (if even that), without any of the actual interaction and back-and-forth that usually happens. I’m still hoping it takes off eventually but if the “big exodus” didn’t do it I don’t see it changing at all for the foreseeable future.
Lurkers still give ad hits, probably even more than OPs
Yes, but not without content.
I mean, I visit but don’t engage. I’ll browse but don’t really do anything on reddit since they made it so cumbersome and difficult to do anything there. Couple that with draconian mods/admins and you’re better off going elsewhere.
Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.
If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.
this fits the narrative nicely but im certain a 2 percent trade for increased profits is not a loss for them
What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.
To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.
Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.
I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.
Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.
On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.
The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.
They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.
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still, enough people have moved over here for Lemmy to finally replace Reddit for my use case (:
Reddit wasn’t much bigger than this when I first used it. This feels a lot like Reddit in those days. It was a nicer place than today’s Reddit.
once again, people turned out to be the root of the problem
The real answer was replacing human-human interaction with human-dolphin interaction.
Still plenty of people who can’t live without reddit unfortunately. We’re just in the initial crowd here. I really think FOSS at this point is the only way to a fair and open future on the Internet Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are great bastions for that.
yet
Please don’t let this be another Reddit, i didn’t switch because i only wanted to get rid of the platform itself.
Aww. Bad news for Elon Twitler
That is the same reason I still have Facebook. Although the content i post there comes from their other app IG, there isnt any political garbage on my IG feed to wade through so I still use that.
(i come here for my political garbage fix)
Interestingly the Facebook algorithm works so well for me it never shows me irl people, or politicians. Only animals, art and news articles (mainly long form editorials from NYT).
it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there
And that’s why it’s only 13%
And he’s not alone.
I’m on tech Twitter and trying to switch to Mastodon. Unfortunately, the latest news and top content are still on Twitter and I don’t want to be missing out on either of those.
A real transition will happen in bursts. I’d love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there’s no budge.
mastodon finally clicked for me and i don’t miss twitter at all. sometimes i accidentally load twitter out of force of habit, but immediately recognize how much it sucks now and close it again. Likewise, reddit’s dead to me too now. i’m finally starting to feel like decentralized federated social media systems might actually work out.
Out of curiosity, can I ask what it was that made mastodon click?
I had two or three goes before realising that choosing the right instance can give you an engaging “local” feed. That seems dramatically less important on lemmy though.
i’m not so sure it was even my local feed that got me feeling like i belonged, really; more that I started reflexively defaulting to the federated feed and found it to be much more lively. Perhaps it was actually the changes brought on by time. Perhaps it was because twitter is rotting like a forgotten corpse in a warm, damp room and all the smart people who actually give a shit finally all started to say “fuck this” and enough of a critical mass has finally accumulated in federated services for them to affect its overall feel. I definitely see content from technically minded, creative, motivated people more on mastodon than i EVER did on twitter, but especially now. Twitter now is just … sad, and it reminds me that I have a better place that I’d enjoy visiting more.
What is reddit? That shit site with psycho owners who want to go public because they are convinced they are successful, despite not being able to make any money and alienating their moderators and userbase? Lols.
i started reading your reply in the voice of Dracula from the intro to Symphony of the Night XD
“WHAT is REDDIT 🍷💫💥 but a MISERABLE pile of SHITPOSTS!”
The 'net ill-needs a failure such as him.
His terms of service are as empty as his revenues!
all this to say, yeah fam 100% totally agree
A must have browser extension to avoid accidentally adding to their traffic volume: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect
you can use libredirect to include other backends too: https://libredirect.github.io/
They didn’t lose money, which is what they care for. They also don’t lose much power on people because these who are leaving are most likely smart people that twitter and other companies don’t want in the first place. Their business plan is to rely on stupid people, just like apple do selling their overpriced products, they know that no matter what as long as they stay relevant there will be idiots following the trend. Purging smart people benefits them because they can create a bigger circlejerk and keep at bay potential troublemakers. Their fail is in the total lack of foresight but big tech and capitalism never ever gave a shit about what’s not directly under their nose.
You mentioned apple, what’s your thoughts on macbook air or pro ? The reason I am asking is because I am looking for a new laptop.
Why would you want one? They are overpriced, unreliable and closed in all possible ways. You can’t change os as you want or swap a component in these. Look at pinebooks or similar devices or used laptops which are well supported by the community like old thinkpads. If you need a more powerful device buy a desktop
Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.
I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn’t fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.
† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.
There are better value options if you’re looking to play games on it. There are cheaper options if budget is a huge concern and you’re OK with low quality plastic builds.
For all metal construction their value is really good, and there still isn’t anything out there that balances the power and battery life they offer. For most professional use cases (which usually mean working with video/photos, in terms of what’s demanding on a laptop), they’re at minimum competitive on raw power. The biggest difference is that can use that power all day on battery, while the stuff that can be argued to be competitive will chew through the battery at high loads (and, compared to Apple, at idle, too).
You actually have no idea what you’re taking about. Don’t you?
There is nothing on the market at any price that provides both of the performance on battery and battery life the MacBook Air has, let alone higher tiers. Apple Silicon is sincerely insanely impressive.
Apple has also always been perfectly fine performance per dollar in the class they’ve actually been in. Their build quality isn’t perfect, but it blows everything meaningfully cheaper out of the water. You can’t compare an aluminum shell with trashy plastic and be surprised the plastic is cheaper. The actually well built stuff like thinkpads were never meaningfully different pricing than Apple. That’s what it costs.
It’s pretty spot on.
You almost had me there - until you claimed Apples business plan was to sell to stupid people.
In his defense , the laptop is the only thing that you can give credit for, rest of the stuff is just overrated BS with locked in feature that will only work with other apple products so yea its selling to stupid people who love apple *ecosystem"
yeah stupid people like most tech workers who just need their tech to work as expected rather than be “customisable”
there’s value in the “just works” when not working costs you hundreds of $ per hour that it doesn’t work
$2000 for a phone is nothing when it’s a professional device
Since at the very least the release of Dell XPS 13 we can have “just-works” machines that run Linux.
Also, specially for developers, the amount of software tools that have better performance and UX on linux is incredible. Homebrew is a clunky mess compared to any other package manager. I’ve worked with devs who refused to run docker on their machines because they said they battery got destroyed. Unless you work with iOS development there is no real, practical advantage in using MacOS for work.
Most nerds I know (including sysadms) started out on Android because of all the reasons you’d expect. Most of them now use iOS / iPadOS because, at home, they want things to Just Work - and have the available income to throw at the problem. Desktop-wise many of them have used Macs on and off, but it seems like lately they trend Windows and Linux again. Probably because macOS has become more hassle than it’s worth with the continued locking down, increased paranoia, lower flexibility and ridiculous storage prices. It used to be that you could work around the storage prices, but these days it’s practically impossible to run programs from somewhere other than Applications if you want your system to stay up to date. Macs just aren’t the great *nix alternative that they used to be, and while Windows is still pretty awful for my use, Linux as a desktop/gaming system is getting better every day. At least so far. I miss when macOS became more useful for every release. The big releases these days break more than they fix for me.
I work in software development, not sure why but most of the sysadmins and DevOps guys I know use Apple (phone and laptop). Most developers use Android (and usually Linux). Most testers use Android and Windows. This is purely from personal experience from the last few teams I worked in.
Mobile phones are toys designed not to be professional devices at all. Photographers use real cameras, journalists, business men, programmers, don’t type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.
If you want your tech to just work you don’t buy apple products that gets locked in by updates and have all sort of incompatibilities, some of their shit doesn’t even have usb ports
Photographers use real cameras
They are real cameras. Have you seen the photos and videos people create with phones? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8qFTgcRV6w
Yes, there are some situations where an iPhone won’t get you a great photo… but that’s true of any real camera too. You don’t take a several hundred thousand dollar Sony HDC-4800 to a wedding for example. Professionals use the right tool for the situation and these days that is often a phone.
journalists, business men, programmers, don’t type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.
I’m two of those, I type constantly on my phone. Yes - I also have a nice mechanical keyboard and I always use it at my desk, but I’m not always at my desk.
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lol what? How do you think the world works? What kind of argument is that - at all? SMH
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Right. Keep pretending.
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“Known to scam people”, “designed to stop working”.
I am fully aware that people can say anything on the internet, but clearly you are not objective at all.
Obviously any further attempt at discussion is pointless. Enjoy your fruit-less life, may it treat you with software updates until the next flagship device is launched.
The scam part notwithstanding, Apple products are designed to stop working. Or, at least, degrade more quickly than they might otherwise. That’s just planned obsolescence though, and Apple certainly isn’t the only one.
Should Apple support their products longer?
Yes, definitely.
But there’s a big difference between not supporting old devices with software updates and designing them to stop working which you allege to.
If you ask me theres way worse fish out there than Apple, and if you look at phone support Apple is the golden standard by a mile with most Android devices still not being supported for more than a year or two tops.
What we should have is a requirement to support devices for at least ten years.
Yes, I know, ten years is a long time, but we’ve gotten to a point where we should expect a device that’s been treated well to last that long.
My 2013 MBP runs just fine, so does my 2011 MBA, my dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2008 even still works. But only one of those is running an updated operating system. Guess which one?
Doesn’t mean that the product is designed to fail, just that Apple chose not to support them any longer.
Mind that I’m not the person you originally responded to. I don’t think Apple installs a time bomb that bricks your device at a certain point.
But it’s disingenuous to say they aren’t intentionally reducing product life spans, and degrading the experience in the meantime. I don’t necessarily mean support either!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
You’re free to decide if you take their statements on this at face value. But it’s really not just Apple. It’s everyone. Cars today have a shorter lifespan than they used to. Fridges. Laptops. Competitor phones.
Like are you saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing generally, isn’t a thing for Apple, or just that it isn’t that bad with them?
I’m saying that anyone singling out Apple for planned obsolescence and disregarding the rest of the market is playing into someone’s playbook.
I’m also fully aware of the so-called batterygate (oh, how I loathe how people add a “gate”-suffix to things to make a “scandal” completely clueless to the fact that Water_gate_ was the name of a fucking hotel. Anyways…), and while we may only speculate wether or not Apple was trying to push people to buy new phones, from appearances it would seem that they were acting in the (somewhat*, I’ll get back to that later) best interest of the consumers, but just failing to communicate it in a good manner.
- Before the story broke people discovered that replacing batteries made the devices run faster again.
- Before Apple started power/performance-throttling devices with worn batteries plenty of older iPhones exhibited shutdown issues, especially at lower SoC. I remember being clueless as to why some devices among friends and family behaved this way. After Batterygate broke it suddenly clicked.
- Built-in batteries can be replaced for a reasonable price either via Apple (less reasonably), or via a third-party (more reasonably). Device experience is regained (minus software bloat), and device longevity is maintained.
Now let me get back to my asterisk:
*: There are different types of battery chemistries, and while Apple thumped their own chests back in the day that their MacBook batteries took 1000 charge cycles to get to 80% of factory capacity.
Apple willingly choose to use cheaper chemistries for iPhone batteries than they could use if they wanted longevity to be higher.
So yes, in that regard you can argue planned obsolescence. The amount of money Apple charge for their phones they could definitely put better batteries in, but on the other hand there’s likely arguments for why they choose these batteries, such as capacity or other characteristics. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on battery chemistries, and will leave that to someone else.
With regards to some of your comments on longevity then and now; note that we used to use the best material to make something, regardless of its impact on people and environment. Some environmental concerns do actually reduce product longevity.
Combined with increased technological complexity and a higher rate of improvement in the digital era than in the analog era it’s been a long period where don’t think it’s too bad to replace a device after a few years time.
However, we’re now seeing so good performance from a lot of our tech products that an upgrade feels much more incremental than it used to.
I definitely think we should demand more lifetime from our products, but this needs to be through regulation and not just left to consumers.
- Software needs to be supported and updated so that the devices can be used safely
- Parts need to be available for replacement.
- Soldering components with limited lifespan to the motherboard should be illegal without providing a backup port and room for a replacement device, at least over a certain form factor. Thinking of SSD’s primarily.
Louis Rossmann also had some good points here: https://youtu.be/l27_75pDvd4
We should be able to use cloud features without being locked to the manufacturer. Especially if they go belly-up.
He mentions a Chinese car manufacturer, and Arlo cameras, but it could just as well be Norwegian EV charge box manufacturer Easee, or a cell phone manufacturer like RIM (BlackBerry) or a TV manufacturer, etc.
So many products today depend on cloud services for basic functionality, and for a lot of those devices their planned obsolescence will be the cloud service they’re connected to.
Can’t you just follow them via one of the mirror instances like bird.makeup?
Interesting.
Every time I follow a twitter/X link it asks me to log in to read it. Which I cannot do as I never bothered to get one. Is there a way to read those links without an account?
bird.makeup is fediverse server software. it creates mirror accounts from twitter users, which means that you can follow twitter accounts from Mastodon (or CalcKey, Pleroma, etc).
You can also just use something like nitter.net to follow and browsing Twitter without an account.
They call it rebrand but changing a name to something really bad is a rebrand now? Isn’t it supposed to come with different behavior or different style as well?
It’s the same man child running it as before, nothing has changed.
I don’t think Twitter and Reddit are going to die quickly. They have user bases that they can monetize and bots to flood content. They were shitty enough that enough of left and gave a nice boost to federated platforms. That boost will grow every time those legacy platforms alienate their users by treating them badly. Like windows and Linux.
Even Digg is still running!
It might never truly “die”, but losing 10%+ of active users is massive. Twitter got decimated. Literally.
First time I have seen accurate use of decimate and literally together (not a language prescrivist, just find this funny.)
13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It’s better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.
It’s certain that of the 120 million that remain, a huge number are bots or spam accounts of some kind. They will be there last “users” to quit the platform. And Elon will be happy to collect ad money to show those bots your ads until the very end.
Choosing a single letter name was a marketing disaster. Elon is truly clueless when it comes to people and social. Even worse when X implies Ex anything.
Maybe lengthen it to xxx.com? Think anyone owns that one?
definitely not, seems completely original. Go for it elon!
People might confuse it for that Vin Diesel movie I guess, nothing else used 3 xs together like that though.
In related news, Twitter is up to 80% nazi billionaire despot disinformation bots now. Congratulations!
