Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed. But those remaining on the app are still engaged, according to new data from Apptopia. Threads, meanwhile, is a nonfactor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, the exodus catapulted Lemmy from being an obscure project to a well rounded one. Lemmy doesn't seem to have as many problems these days as it had initially. Meanwhile, we are spoilt for choices on clients after many of the defunct reddit clients were repurposed for Lemmy.
I think my only concern with Lemmy is that federation is not guaranteed two-way. Some changes have broken federation in the past for certain instances where they can see everything but their comments or posts are not federated out. I would hope, at least in the future, this part of Lemmy would be difficult to break with an update.
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.
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.