By now, you may have heard about Elon Musk’s handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, and her disastrous interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event. However, somewhat overlooked amid some of the more viral moments of the discussion, Yaccarino dropped some previously unknown stats that don’t exactly paint such a rosy picture for the company:
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing daily active users under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Speaking at Vox Media’s Code 2023 tech conference earlier this week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.
According to a series of tweets that Musk himself posted in November of last year, Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users the week before his takeover in late November of last year.
Following the conference, X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users, according to The Information. Before specifically saying X had 225 million active users, Yaccarinno previously cited “200 to 250 million” daily active users earlier in the interview.
However, even X’s revised number of 245 million daily active users would still see X lose millions or around 3.7 percent of daily active users from before Musk’s acquisition.
In fact, daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. According to the aforementioned Musk tweet, Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. Compared to the daily active users Twitter was pulling late last year under Musk’s leadership, X has shed nearly 15 million users – a drop of roughly 5.6 percent.
Twitter first started sharing this metric, which the company refers to as monetizable daily active users or mDAU, years before Musk even planned to buy the company. The reason? Twitter’s daily active user numbers were reliably more favorable for the company than its other metrics when it shared its quarterly reports for investors and shareholders.
When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users. She then moved the discussion to the platform’s Communities feature, the company’s answer to Facebook Groups, saying X had 50,000 communities and that engagement numbers and time spent in those communities were up since June.
Along with the daily active user metrics, Yaccarino also shared that X now has a record 550 million monthly active users. This would be up from the 541 million “monthly users” metric that Musk shared in a post in July.
It’s unclear, however, just how much of the monthly active user growth has happened under Musk when compared to how the company was doing prior to his takeover. That’s because in 2019, Twitter stopped reporting this number in favor of the daily active user metric. The company entered that year with 321 million monthly active users, the last publicly reported monthly active user metric directly from Twitter.
It should be noted that Musk has shifted away from both the daily and monthly active user numbers in favor of “unregretted user minutes,” a metric seemingly made-up by Musk.
That’s still a fuck ton of people using the platform. WHY
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Remember, “active users”, not “total accounts”, so they’re probably Russian bots.
Will this be the “web 2.0” crash, when people realize you can’t monetize a web page with “slap the monkey”
I would also assume that many people are oblivious or just don’t care about the happenings, just like on Reddit.
Lots of them are reporters and politicians that know fully well where Elon Musk’s road leads to. If I wasn’t stuck in the same society as them, I would even find it amusing how happily they are dancing on the way to the gallows.
There’s also a ton of Muskites that like him both because of and in spite of his actions. Especially the “long TSLA” crowd who are financially tied to his hip.
So long as Facebook and Twitter successfully deliver messages to your contacts, their core service still works for most. Same goes for reddits votes.
Because there isn’t an alternative with other people on it. Now that it’s confirmed that it’s actually declining, it’ll start to snowball its way until we hit critical mass
Mastodon is working just fine.
The overall vibe and attitude of mastadon’s user base chases a lot of potential newcomers away. It’s not replacing Twitter any time soon.
Yeah, it is, tech wise.
But here’s the thing: Mastodon is not a viable alternative for most people right now because it’s missing the “normies”. Most people don’t even know what FOSS stands for and probably think it’s an STD, nuclear missile, or some form of coronavirus. Most of them are perfectly happy being on Twitter/Reddit/TikTok/FaceBook/Instagram. Without the masses, Mastodon cannot be a Twitter (or X, whatever you call it) replacement.
Yeah and it’s missing actual people over there
Before I would say marketing, habits, and access to information.
Now that I can’t see a tweet without being logged on (after I killed my account because apartheid andy?) Idfk
Because all the other people they care about are on there too. And they won’t leave because all the other people they care about are on there too. And theh…
It’s a form of interdependence, in a way. Those who rely on Ex-Twitter as a platform to broadcast their microblogs (be that a tech service proviser using it to report on ongoing system outages, a content creator promoting some new content or a news outlet, well, announcing news) are reluctant to migrate while their audience is still there. The audience, in turn, is gonna be relauctant to move away from the platform their service providers, news outlets and content creators use.
The more people make that leap, the stronger the encouragement will be for the rest to leap as well, but the other issue is “where to?” There are multiple competitors, and particularly between BlueSky and Mastodon, the decision apparently isn’t as straightforward as it may seem for those of us that are already entrenched in the fediverse. I’d like to believe Mastodon wins out in the end, but it’s not so clear cut for some of the people I talked to.
Plenty of people want to leave, but between the things holding them back and the daunting question of “where to?”, they’re afraid to. As things start to shift, competitors emerge and trends become visible, more and more may decide to finally jump ship, but that’s going to take time.
But surely any social media is the same? The UI has always been terrible with hard to follow comment chains, it seems like just a bad platform before any of this, I just don’t see the appeal.
I remember it used to just be “hey this is where Stephen Fry tweets his thoughts in shortform” but why can’t he do that on Facebook,on Reddit, mastadon,Lemmy, Instagram,tiktok, and godknows what other platforms there are out there.
If one person can make an account, and another person can follow you, that’s all twitter seems to offer, and everyone does that now.
Not really, the format and culture on each of those sites differs slightly. Most people are reluctant to adapt and repost their content across seven platforms if one has enough users and a fitting format to be worth the while.
There’s a certain gravity effect to popular sites - if you sign up on some unknown service that offers all the same features as Twitter, but doesn’t have a lot of users, you won’t get as much content as if you sign up on Twitter where there’s already thousands of (micro-)blogs, entertainers and artists to follow. If most of your family and friends is using Whatsapp, you’d be amiss not to do so too.
If your family then switches to, say, Telegram, you’re inclined to open an account there too. Nevermind that most other friends aren’t on there, you’ve got some people there at least. Likewise, if your friends open Mastodon accounts, you might sign up just to get their toots too.
But they won’t have the mass appeal of a platform that “everyone else is using” already. Migrating your stuff to an alternate platform might make you a vanguard, but that’s not an easy road to take.
Microblogging sites (Twitter, Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads) are catered towards short, concise, easily digestible and attention-span-friendly messages. Even the longer twitter threads are more digestible because they’re in nice little chunks. If you slap a reddit wall of text in front of someone, they’re more likely to balk at it and not even bother to read.
Comment Chains being worse isn’t much of a drawback if your focus isn’t on reading all the comments, and in any event, the actual reach of the messages (and conversely, the number of feeds to subscribe to) can easily outweigh UX deficiencies.
Until some radical changes prompt people to actually reflect on the platform and begin to scatter. UX will play a great role in initially choosing the new platform and subsequently, the trend of where “everyone else” (or most of the people you care about) is going will impact it again.
Because there is no useful replacement. The people I want to follow are nowhere else. When major news sources left Twitter, they left to nowhere except their own websites. The end result is that I don’t really keep up with the news anymore.
RSS needs to make a comeback.
I know a lot of people that rely on it for sports news and certain things. I don’t think there’s a solid enough niche for both those delivering the news and their audiences on an alternative.
I mean, I’m surprised there’s still people on Reddit, but I think it’s on the same principle.
11% decrease means that only 1 out of every 10 people actually left.
1 in every 10.
We literally live in an age where corporations can do whatever they wish.
Am honestly not sure why people are surprised by these numbers. Facebook had data leaks like no one before in history, even resulted in number of laws being made to prevent it from happening again… and the response from users was: nothing. They keep uploading everything and tracking their own moves by the second. Not only that, Instagram has risen in popularity since then. People are just cattle. They do what others do. Simple
1 in every 9, but your point stands
FOMO.
Liberalism. They will resist changes to the status quo because ultimately they’re not that perturbed by open displays of nazism.
Artists still use it to make a living, companies still use it to make announcements, politicians still use it, and even some city departments still use it.
Until most of these leave, it’ll remain unfortunately.
I admittedly still go there for porn lol but if they fuck that up I’m all out
Even the porn is leaving. Multiple porn users/ accounts have stopped posting as well. I have an alt on Twitter just for porn and that has begun to dry up. You can see when the last time they logged on/ tweeted and it’s been weeks. It really isn’t hard to see that Twitter is a sinking ship.
A lot of research articles is still shared on it and nowhere else. I would love people moving somewhere else but it didn’t happen for now.
Celebrety? I never got it to begin with.
My reasons for being on Twitter haven’t really changed since I created my account in 2014. When they killed 3rd party apps, I started using it exclusively via a browser, but other than that, I haven’t noticed much change. My experience of Twitter is basically the same as it has always been, and who the owner is doesn’t really concern me. I didn’t pay much attention to what Jack Dorsey was doing then, and I don’t pay much attention to Elon now either, except for the news I’m forcibly fed about him on Lemmy. On Twitter, I can at least mute him, as I did ages ago.
I can’t really relate to the complaints I read from people about Twitter. My feed is highly curated, and it’s 98% stuff I’m interested in, with the rest being random memes and cat videos, pretty much.
On Twitter, I can at least mute him, as I did ages ago.
Allegedly
As if I didn’t notice if he started popping up on my feed again
He’s a scumbag bitch and he is actively worsening discourse at a fairly important time to not be affecting the free flow of information. That is not to say the free flow of all speech but also stopping lies and propaganda from disseminating. He’s bad for the world.
Also I have filtered out posts with his name in the title, quirky bitch got on my feed by “stepping down”.
That’s still stunningly more people still using it than they deserve. I guess it’s hard to create new social networks.
A lot of people I talk to just don’t care about social media anymore. Either deleted/deactivated profiles, or just stopped being there. It’s all either corporate bs, fake engagement, ragebait, or you’re psychologically manipulated into scrolling through content you don’t even enjoy
Which is interesting because you and I both on social media interacting. Are we here because of the lack of algorithms/corporate bullshit?
Part of why I liked reddit was that the site was, in my experience, content-first rather than user-first. Social media like Instagram feels very centered around the users trying to get likes and subscribes, trying to gain a following, and that kind of bullshit. On reddit (and here) I pretty much never look at someone’s name. No one feels like they’re trying to build a following or a brand. It was just a place for people to talk about Elden Ring or whatever.
I never really used facebook so I can’t speak to that authoritatively, but remember when they tried to see if they could make everyone sad? And somehow no one went to jail over it?
But I’m an old man who yells at clouds. I don’t know if that’s how other people use social media.
That is one of the reasons why I enjoy this platform, so far. I feel like when something is posted, I can have a proper conversation about what’s happening. And a polite one, on top of that
I think I’m the same way? I know I much rather build my feed into something I want to read as opposed to what the algorithm thinks I want to read.
It’s not even about my own feed at that point. The platform is just irredeemable. They’ve shown that bigots, nazis, “secret government controversy”, and evangelicals are all welcome there, and with that said, I have nothing I could want there
Isn’t this assuming “active daily users” equate to people? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “active daily users” are simply bots Musk has allowed to proliferate throughout the platform?
It’s not … people think it is… but i left Facebook, insta, Twitter and etc and I still talk to friends… I still talk to family…
I don’t get in pointless arguments or support racists and facists.
All and all it’s win win.
💀
It’s honestly fucking hilarious how hard Musk has Trumped this company.
People are still going to call it twitter and tweeting because it’s usable in a sentence. Calling it “x” is a thoroughbred-mouthbreather move. For example:
“Twitter tweeted an announcement that it would add disclaimers to tweets with misleading and false information regarding voter fraud”
“X x’d an announcement that it would add disclaimers to x’s that american elections are rigged and Trump and Musk are totally not the swamp they complain about”
“Blaze your glory!”
At a certain point it’s not trolling, you’re just being a retard.
It’s not “x’d”, the preferred term is “x-creted”.
Hah… I like it. tweets are now x-cretions.
X-itter Pronounced Shitter is the best name I have heard.
I prefer to call it Xitter, and the posts Xits.
Be sure to pronounce the “x” as in Chinese pinyin.
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I loved it, thanks for the laughs. Turds it is.
Musk wanted a swastika, but the PR department said hard no. After firing half the department, they still said no and proposed using X instead as it’s close enough. Musk had been pretending it was his idea since then.
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This looks like a sci-fi nazi symbol in a book after the author decided to stop being subtle.
Any actual sources on this?
No. I’m trolling. But Musk is going so far of the rails it’s plausible.
Well, your Timing couldnt be better. Just read about the Tesla harrassment lawsuit from October 1 I believe, which includes swastikas in Tesla buildings…
Husband: X fucked me hard last night
Wife: fuck you and your ex, I’m getting a divorce!
Calling it “x” is a thoroughbred-mouthbreather move.
I’m calling it X. That site doesn’t deserve to be called Twitter anymore. Let them lose the recognizable brand and cling onto a random letter that makes searches and discussions about it much harder.
What I find most interesting, though, is that there were only 250 Million daily active users in the first place. Musk paid like 176 bucks per user. There’s no way he could’ve milked that much revenue out of the users in any reasonable time frame.
Sure, there’s weekly and monthly active users, but how many ads can you possibly show someone who spends 5 minutes per week on formerly-known-as-Twitter?
Looking at his recent posts it looks like he didn’t buy it to make money but to increase his influence. Just recently he promoted a post that calls to vote for the farright party in Germany for example.
That was the one bonus to him. He bought it because he made a stupid 420 joke that had legal ramifications (and not for the first time). He tried to back out of buying it but it was too late.
I thought it was just a way to sell a shitload of Tesla shares while the market was high, without it making it look like he wanted to sell TSLA. But then he got caught by the tail, and now he is just making what he thinks is best out of the situation. When life gives you Twitter, make it X? Idk.
Oh I don’t know… twitter was probably seen as good tool for more pump & dump and other financial scams, not to mention the opportunity to influence worldwide politics.
Then there’s the wish to turn it into an everything app with micro transactions at every step of the way. Such a beast wouldn’t get far in the EU, and probably not the US either.
What the fuck are “unregretted user minutes”? I regret every minute any user spends on that site, so it should be zero.
since it’s elon, i wouldn’t be surprised if it was how much time people spend reading his tweets
This feels tantalizingly close to the truth.
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It suprises me that people still use Twitter. Like, how spineless are you?
Especially journalists. Why are you using a platform that is actively hostile to you?
Exposure. Present day journalism lives and dies by exposure. If you’re not willing to prostitute yourself for exposure, you have no chance
Yeah, but exposure to who, Nazis?
Users are only down 10%. If the only ones left are Nazis that is a lot of Nazis.
It’s ridiculous how many people who don’t mind being lumped in with Nazis tho
You have to also keep in mind that the majority of users is unaware of these discussions. They just keep using Twitter in their bubble without caring about what’s happening to the platform as a whole.
The actual news Outlets dont need that. Twitter brings in nearly no readers/watchers to their own sites.
The journalists who are on X are there to promote themselves.
Because the people or companies they report on still use the platform :(
Most journalists are entertainers in disguise. They do not care, as long as there is an audience.
Until every last one is banned and has to move on.
Am actually surprised people expected different outcome. Sure, some security and privacy loving people would have left. Others might have been against new policies or disliked where it was going. But majority are just going to do what majority does… that is to say, stay.
People have been so desensitized to so many things I wouldn’t be surprised if someone invented butt-plugs which vibrate near a restaurant with good reviews and people would be trampling over each other on black friday to buy a six pack for the whole family. Regardless of the fact it tracks your movement and makes you walk like a broom stick is stuck in your rectum. It gives good reviews!!! And then of course Apple would come 3-18 years late to the market and invent anodized aluminum one which has a glowing logo so fans can recognize each other by glowing bottoms and everyone would scream revolution.
I’m mostly shocked they’ve not lost more and faster. I get more engagement on my ~500 follower Mastodon account than my ~50k follower twitter account these days (sure, I could paid the manchild for more exposure, and if he wasn’t so insufferable and had actually made the service better, I might’ve considered that)
It’s possible that you have different audience type on those two. But regardless, your own experience is not a measure of millions of users at large.
If my own experience had been unique, or been contradicted by the data, you’d have a point, but it’s an experience shared by almost everyone I follow, many of whom have abandoned larger followings on Twitter for the same reason, and it’s an experience where the only thing in question given the data is how rapid the decline is, not whether the decline is happening.
Can’t speak for other people, but I use Twitter and Reddit for different reasons. I use Reddit for communities I have an interest in, so when the move to Lemmy/kbin started, it wasn’t that hard for me to migrate over. For Twitter though, I use it to follow specific people and/or company news, so unless they decide to migrate to Mastodon or other platforms, Twitter will still be a site I visit.
Nah man, I prefer following people outside of Twitter/Mastodon. But mostly they call the police.
So far no one has given me compelling reason to leave.
Why do you care anyways? I can’t figure out why anyone would use something like Facebook or TikTok either, but they do and I’m not going around calling them spineless. Not everyone needs to like/not like the things I do.
Why do you care anyways?
Because I want enshittified platforms to fail so this horrible “trend” can stop and companies actually start focusing again on “how to make a better site” instead of “how to make the site that will make us the most money”
This is a good example of what I mean, when I said that no one has given me a compelling reason. Not everyone needs to like/not like things you do. I’d like other people to do things that would benefit my desires aswell, but I don’t go around demanding that. Twitter is no shittier today, than it was the day I joined. From my perspective, nothing has changed, so I have no more reason to leave than I had reason to join in the first place.
I don’t use any of them but I understand someone wanting to use FB way more than twitter lol, twitter has always been the most useless to me. Im not sure I can really think of anything it does something else doesnt do better.
I don’t know any other site with such large community of adult content creators. Reddit may be close.
Content creators? Bro they are tweets.
Reddit is mostly 14 year olds and toxic chronic Internet dwellers who somehow also are the most normie person ever.
Honestly all social media is shit. Even lemmy.
Content creators? Bro they are tweets.
What? Because I choose to share my pictures on twitter, I don’t count as a content creator?
Elon Musk could not wake up tomorrow and the world would be much better off.
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We could even use the same photos of the bomb from Die Hard to convince the public that they have WMDs!
Ugh, now I have to stop using that phrase
40 upvotes, 0 downvotes on my instance: Wishing death for neurodivergent people is cool!
Thanks, you just reminded me to delete my account
That’s very disappointing. So at least 90% of people are still on there, if not 95% or even 98% still there. That’s barely more than a rounding error. Fuck, that is disappointing.
Government, corporate, and celebrities haven’t budged. That’s the problem. I left about 2 weeks after the blue checks started getting pushed to the top of comments. Those blue-checklefucks are trash.
It’s not that easy to break an addiction, but I have faith that Musk can fuck this website up juuuuust enough to chase away a higher percentage.
Surprising really, people are STILL sticking around
It took 16 years to build the network to where it was, it’ll take a long time for it to fall apart. Think of it like a train network. Imagine if the NY subway lost 3% of its stations, and some riders who either went from or to that station stopped using the subway. People might say “oh, it’s no big deal, just 3%, it’s still super useful to have a subway.” But then those riders that stopped using it are no longer using the other stations on their trips, and it’s then 3% harder to justify every station on the network. So any station that was borderline not worth it before now becomes definitely not worth it, and those drop. So now it’s 6% lower, and so on until there’s no stations left.
My friend, I’ll take your first point in good faith. It is in the right it’ll take a long time to fall apart. True. Thank you, I’m cheered up. I will kindly offer the following for the rest of your comment, as honest freindly help. You present a false analogy fallacy, we’re talking passenger losses, not stations. Then you segue into a slippy slope fallacy. I mean, it’s a nice comment and all, but factually 97% count on users or 103% is just noise it the data. We cannot conclude much at all from it and that’s why it’s factually and honestly, disappointing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most people probably don’t subscribe to news feeds that you or I might. They probably only see a blurb about anti-semitism and such going up.
I subscribe to a bunch of tech news and nerd blogs. I see multiple reports of each major change, with multiple takes, and multiple examples. My awareness of the problems is a lot higher than I expect the average user and I never even used the service.
It’s useful to remember that people who bother moving to an alternative that is less prominent and harder to engage are already quite different from the average. Those who signed up for BlueSky got invites to an alternative, so that doesn’t count. They did it to have a seat at the next potential big thing. Lemmy and Mastadon do not strike me as potential-next-big-things.
ETA: stream of consciousness, just woke up.
Yeah, I imagine that this concentrated the cesspool even more, increased concentration of extremism, whether political or religious, just by removing moderates. I was going to use the term liberals with a small “l” because that’s what the damn word means, but went with inventing a new noun to be clear.
Not everyone wants to come to niche communities where none of their friends are. Normal people just ignore Musk and interact with their friends. Something you Lemmy users don’t seem to know how to do.
I only ever interacted with strangers on ShXitter. I guess that means you’re right. Hello stranger 👋
Considering it’s a Fascist platform now, it would be alarming if it weren’t losing users.
Especially given that it used to have billions of users, back when it wasn’t Fascist.
I’m sure the users will come back once Must starts charging a monthly fee for using TwitteX.
For those unfamiliar with website/app analytics: a hugely successful, modern advanced analytics campaign (say AI or Machine Learning based) might move the needle on a a key KPI for a huge business like Twitter to the tune of say 3%-5%.
Over 11% would be huge numbers for a highly advanced, highly focused team to achieve in terms of measurable impact on a higher platform like that.
This moral imperative humping dolt achieved that number in negative effects to his company without even trying.
Without even trying?
What are you talking about, he re-routed his jet after his associate suggested ripping servers out themselves. Then personally crawled underneath and started unplugging them. Then hired a team of undocumented workers to move them overnight, to save a few bucks.
This idiotic move directly lead to huge outtages and the entire snafu of Ron DeSantis Twitter Spaces presidential announcement.
That sounds like a lot of effort, he is definitely trying… lol
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They can be for a certain level of infrastructure/server costs. They can’t be for the loan servicing Elon is putting Twitter through. That’s why he’s trying to pivot to banking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d just pulled that 225M out of her ass to not look completely clueless, as it’s right in the middle of the ballpark 200-250M she mumbled about earlier.
I kinda doubt this. What’s more likely is that she knew it was 225 and ±25 to be more vague.
Don’t know if more likely but yeah, it’s a possibility, too.
It would just be such a weird thing to lie about, and then not even pick the largest option. She undoubtedly knows the previous number, she could have just repeated that instead of making one up.
I don’t trust the numbers anyway. And although Musk pretended to be angry about bots inflating the user stats to try to get out of buying the company after the gag got real, he hasn’t exactly discouraged bots from inflating the numbers now.
