Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.
What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.
To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.
Social media fatigue is slowly getting traction. I don’t have an article or study at hand to back it up, but I read about it the other day. Especially in younger generations it’s a trend already.
Also, but that’s only my personal theorie, i think it’s a trend only among the less-hateful people. Hateful people nonstop spewing their vile messages everywhere is making “normal” people leave, which then turns off even more “normal” people.
The enraged slowly turning (unmoderated) social media into one big echo chamber.
It’s really not fun to be on any of the platforms anymore, if it ever even was.
I don’t know if there will be a new thing, but if there is I think it can’t look like any existing platform as they’re all kind of trash and have largely the same problems.
I think there was also a naive technological optimism in the early 2000s and 2010s that has died off quite a bit. Tech companies came in looking like they were using some new type of capitalism that wasn’t all about the almighty dollar, but instead about progress more generally…now most of us know better.
There was a period in the mid 2000’s of like 3-4 years where social media was fun and not super toxic. It was still toxic to a degree, but nowhere near like it is now. Then it started to decline rapidly once the general public started to get involved as smart phones became better and better at helping keep people terminally online.
I hate sounding like a hipster, but everything good or at least semi-decent really does comes to an end once it gets saturated by the general public.
Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square"
He says it so clearly here which makes me wonder how people don’t realize it:
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
A private company that is in control of who is allowed to talk and what they are allowed to say. A private company that even decides what you hear and see while walking the square. Meanwhile also shovelling ads in front of you while you try to find the people you actually want to engage with.
“Social” media owned by private corporations is not social. Such media is anti-social, corporate control of public spaces that ought to belong to the people, just like they mostly do in real life.
How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?
You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.
I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.
I think it describes it well.
