Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great. It isn’t advertising, or social manipulation, or exorbitant subscription fees and API charges. It isn’t restriction of speech or freedom of speech, it isn’t algorithmically controlled moderation and curation.
It is the people that make a social network great.
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What consumers and products? I only see numbers on a spreadsheet going up and down!
It is the people that make a social network great.
You’re right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It’s the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.
Disagree. They know. It’s just that they’re trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform’s interests are constantly at war with the user’s interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.
Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.
Call it “enshittification”: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
They don’t care about making a great or even good product. It’s solely about making as much money in as short a time period as possible, regardless of the long term consequences.
I don’t have access to Twitter’s balance sheet, but I’d wager a guess that they’re on financial life support in the short term, and they’ve got a stage 4 cancer diagnosis in the long term.
The only thing Twitter has going for them over a competitor like Mastodon or Threads, is their name. And Musk has made sure their name is covered in shit and mud.
Twitter was doomed before Musk bought them, and they’re super doomed now.
While it is true, there are also some factors which make people converge on some platforms. Factors beyond simply presence of other people. Like technical features.
The biggest technical feature that draws users is the Interface. Twitter didn’t gain popularity (or even the Bird icon and “tweet” moniker) until Tweetie, Twitteriffic and eventually Tweetbot came along.
Reddit was just a website for (no offence intended) “neckbearded basement dwelling incels” until RiF and Apollo made it more accessible.
Mastodon usage soared when 3rd Party Twitter apps were killed and once once again when Ivory was released.
I didn’t even know about Lemmy until I heard @[email protected] and @[email protected] mentioned it on The Talk Show. I didn’t start using it regularly until I discovered wefwef and Memmy.
You’re not wrong about there being multiple factors, but I’d argue that this is often the least important factor. The technical features are easily replicated. (See: threads, stories, reels/tiktoks/shorts, etc.)
Network effects, on the other hand, have a stranglehold like no other.
You’re on Facebook because your family’s on there. You’re on Twitter because your favorite meme pages are on there. You’re on Instagram because the photographer you really like is on there. So on and so forth.
Turns out forcing people to use Twitter less makes people use Twitter less, what a discovery!
But have you considered paying $8 a month to use features that used to be free and also associate yourself with far right?
If you’re still on Twitter, you’re part of the problem. I don’t care about your excuses.
Well look at me, I’m part of the problem.
The fact that people who have paid get to have their replies appear first means that you see the people with the worst opinions (people who are fine with giving Musk money) most of the time, just makes it a very un-fun experience.
That’s why I left. That’s all I see on replies
Good! Hope to see the same stories about Reddit and other major social media platforms that have taken steps to prioritize profit over the community.
The users are your golden apple. Abuse them, the apple turns sour.
I thought the proverb was: cook a golden goose and you’ll eat for a day. Teach the golden goose to lay eggs and you’ll eat for a lifetime.
Gold is edible btw. Or at least inedible and non-toxic. It passes through without chemically reacting.
Proverbial fish: am I a joke to you?
Give a man a fire, you’ll keep him warm for a night. Light a man on fire, you’ll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
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We should have that “your joke but worse” community here.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m barely using reddit/twitter and now I spend most of my online time on Lemmy/Mastodon.
Same here but i’m afraid we’re not really in the majority.
+1 to this. I’ve had way more insightful conversations on the Fediverse—with less followers/recognition/brand—than on any centralized platform.
Love the discourse. Makes me think, allows me to learn, consider new perspectives, etc.
That’s fine. The user base doesn’t need to be in the nine or ten figures to have a community that has decent activity. Even with the thousands activity has been impressive, and that’s with all this fragmentation across instances too.
The fragmentation doesn’t really matter though, as we can all read and participate in the same threads :)
Yep hi programing.dev instance!
And hello to you, lemmy.one!
Hello lemmy.monster! Now that’s the coolest instance name I’ve come across.
It doesn’t take much to panic these idiots. Even a 10% drop means someone has to answer for it
We never will - we live in the TikTok generation
ugh don’t remind me… i get your point but i still wish for the Fediverse to become more accessible
btw there is a Tiktok clone for the fediverse called Goldfish, although i haven’t tried it lol
also, nice username
Its entirely possible tiktok will be banned by the feds here in the US sooner or later which will most likely nuke a large chunk of anglosphere content. So we may see a shift away from it sooner or later.
Ribbit
reminds me of the new reddit video player. ew.
Yeah, I’m feeling this is more on Meta having excelent timing with Threads unfortunately
Rather than excellent timing, I would bet that Meta saw the writing on the wall the moment Twitter started doing cuestionable things under Elon. I don’t think they would’ve launched Threads to compete against pre-Elon Twitter.
Also, albeit small in overall users, there’s been a constant exodus of users ever since Elon took over, so they are trying to capitalize on that.
No social network dies over night, but with Threads racing to become the mainstream text-based social media, Twitter will be slowly becoming irrelevant, until it dies.
Edit: Grammar
I was curious about this. Turns out meta started talking about a Twitter competitor app in November, and started developing it in January.
Threads is a direct response to Musk buying Twitter.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
Wonder how much of it is because of Threads and how much of it is from making the site inaccessible without accounts and the rate limit.
They removed the need for an account to view tweets not long after they implemented it.
As far as I know the rate limit is still in effect though.
I wonder, how many schools could you build for $44billion?
A random online estimator told me about 27m for a high school in the US. So like 1466 if you round that up to 30m for easier math.
They built a new elementary school down the road a few years ago. It cost $63 million, so about 700 of those.
Might make sense. Cost seems to be 250-800 per square foot depending on construction method and quality.
The example I looked at was for a two story 130,000 sqft I think. But some districts shovel all students into one mega school, so they would be huge and much more expensive.
On a side note: Why is this image (from Threads, don’t know the version accessible on Twitter, as it’s not accessible to me) a JPEG, and a very much compressed one, too? You see non-tech people sharing screenshot JPEGs all the time, but they are usually in okay quality and only degrade when shared and edited a lot. This one is basically unreadable from the beginning, and it’s posted by a guy who studied computer science and leads a leading tech company since 14 years. Or is it really Threads transcoding and downgrading images so much?
In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it’s the photo sharing community’s microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.
EDIT: In the next meantime, Threads itself seems to be dead, at least the embeeded tweet (or thread, or whatever they call it) in the Verge article has been replaced by a “View on Threads” button which leads me to an absolutely blank page.
Instagram completely mangles image quality, and Threads seems to be tied into Instagram stuff on the back-end, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening here.
I’m here for the schadenfreude, but it’s horrible PR for Cloudflare to post the traffic graph of one of their customers tanking. And their CEO doing it, no less.
I’m not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There’s no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.
It’s not a graph of their protection product(s), it’s a graph from their DNS-service.
They don’t get the Data from Twitter, they get it from the UsersIt’s free widespread advertisement for cloudflare, we’re even talking about them right now
tbf the more people hear about cloudflare, the less people want to do with them.
The opposite, they do great things abd they have awesome products. Yes, they are expensive, but good too and you can get good stuff for free too.
DNS Queries don’t care about your silly PR. DNS is king.
Twitter isn’t their customer friends.
If I were Akamai, I’d be sure that my sales team knew to bring it up casually in conversation with every customer. Can’t buy trust, have to earn it, and you can squander it all so easily.
To the surprise of no one besides Musk, probably
