Technology @lemmy.world mesamune @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Elon Musk hides X engagement figures amid user exodus

www.newsweek.com Elon Musk hides X engagement figures amid user exodus

As X loses users, the platform introduced a new feature allowing optional hiding of likes, shares, and other engagement metrics.

96 comments

Nazi, who inherited his generational fortune through slave labor, makes people uncomfortable. They leave. Nazi lies about being weird and/or a Nazi.
- Insists being a Nazi should not influence anything and demands people and ad money returns.
  
  How long until he sues users to return like he is with advertisers?
This just in, lying piece of shit liar lies about something again. 😆
X is done.
- Yep. Fortunately for Elon (and, you know, fascism) he doesn't need it any more. For Elon, it is already 'Mission Accomplished'. The richest, most thin-skinned losers on Earth already control the biggest economy and the biggest military. What more could that shitstain hope to get out of Twitter?
  
  Well now he's calling for a new election in the UK (presumably to put the right wing bac in) so looks like he's not happy with just proxy ruling America.
- It served its purpose.
  
  Let that sink in.
- Oh I hope this is true.
  
  In the future I hope they do studies on what percentage of nazi content is necessary to destabilize a platform and get an established base of regular people and companies to flee.
- X never was. Twitter is dead though
- I hope so, although it might serve as an easy way for companies to bribe the first lady Musk for favours with Trump
  
  Might as well make "Biggest Donor" a cabinet position at this point
don't look guys! I totally did not piss my pants!

-- Elon Musk
- That one 2 panel image of people laughing at a guy who pissed on his pants and he says: "huh. free marketing."
Now do this to Tesla. Make owning a Tesla make you a pariah.
- It already does.
  
  Sorry to people that haven't sold theirs yet.
  
  They haven’t even been out a year. Their user agreement stipulates they can’t resell them yet
- Decent first step with the Cybertruck. Though he botched it and instead of making owners pariahs, they turn owners into clowns and lacerated patients.
- Being a Tesla owner is brutal because neither the left nor the right respect you.
  
  Gotta get one of the "I bought this before we knew Elon was an asshole" bumper stickers.
  
  Obviously only works on a car that came out before we knew Elon was an asshole
- There's a guy in Hawaii selling "I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy" bumper stickers for $10, and he's already sold over 10,000 this year.
  
  Good, I’m glad for him. With the upcoming tariffs/trade war coming our way, I can only imagine how much higher the cost of living in Hawaii is about to get.
  
  Link?
- Where I live there's not many teslas.
  
  But I saw one the other day and it was squeaking like a cheap plastic toy.
  
  I wasn't going to buy one. But seeing such bad quality construction even noticable by afar, reaffirmed my choice.
  
  There are a ton around me. Every time I pass one I pay close attention to the body. Many times, it looks to me like the body panels just don't line up. They kind of look like shit TBH.
- I already peg Tesla drivers next to Altimas and Ram 2500s, just different energy
  
  Tesla is for the people who don’t want to drive a car, and their driving aptitude is frequently on full display
  
  Altimas and Ram needs no further explanation, you already know
  
  I already peg Tesla drivers
  
  O rly?
- Tesla is already a rolling pile of shit. How much more punishment do you want their owners to have?
Release the X files, Elon.
- I used to like that show :(
  
  At first, the air of mystery suggested hidden depths, but increasing exposure revealed that it was all just woven from thin air and would routinely come out with increasingly absurd stories that contradicted previous statements.
  
  Also, the X-Files.
  
  We don't talk about the fox reboot seasons. That didn't happen
kek

topkek, even
I never really understood twitter. Feels to me like it's all about following personalities in a poor format that doesn't cater to discussion. I've had an account since early, mostly for testing twitter integrations for work. I haven't even bothered to log in for a couple of years.

I logged in yesterday just to deactivate my account.
- I think it really only made sense to me when it was SMS social media.
  
  Can't remember which phone I had but for something like this it was neat.
  
  I made a Twitter account in the early days when I was a teenager. The sole reason I made it was because one of my favorite bands had an account. Their posts would be sent in an SMS to my phone, and the cool thing about that was how it felt like they were texting me personally.
  
  I have no idea when I last logged in, let alone when I last posted. When the SMS feature was dropped, so did my interest.
  
  The last time I used Twitter was when I had ubertwitter for blackberry.
- It scans if you look at it like short form blogging. Even YouTube runs under about the same operating theater. The comments are there but they have to beg / trick the viewers into engaging.
Elon Musk before: "Oh, these old Twitter executives were so dumb. When number go up, you've gotta show it everywhere!"

Elon Musk now: "Number not go up? For cripes sake, don't show it!"
All of the numbers are fake anyway. You can just sit there and f5 the page to get views on your own tweet lmao
- is this true Captain?
  
  Yup just tried it again. Also basically anything counts as a view, scroll by the post, embedded tweet, scraper scraping the tweet. Almost every time the page is viewed by anyone or anything will bump the number even if it's repeated visit from the same viewer withing short time frame.
  
  I guess it's kinda nice that it's simply transparent like that for admins but that's not what users expect - it's a useless metric and very easy to inflate.
  
  I'm tempted to fire up a dozen android emulators with a refresh loop to see how far this can be pushed but I really don't want to have that shit platform on my mind longer than I have to tbh.
Over a million people joined Bluesky after the election and seem to be using it. Also a lot of news & media companies have moved over too. So I would assume that at least that many users have disappeared from X or their activity has diminished. On top of that all the bots have gone home now the election is over so the amount of activity must have suffered. And Bluesky is basically old Twitter so people are settling into it and liking it.

I would advise anyone who still using X to give it a try. And if they want to use X for whatever reason - uninstall the app, install Control Panel for Twitter into their mobile browser and browse that for a relatively bullshit free experience - no ads, no algorithmic lists, just what you subscribe to.
- I'm loving it so far!!
- Should I try Bluesky even if I barely have used Xitter recently?
  
  If you don't use Twitter then I don't see any reason to try Bluesky since it could basically be described as classic Twitter. But if you liked Twitter until it because a cesspit of far right shitheads, crypto bros, bots, and ads then give Bluesky a go.
  
  Sure. There's not a lot of "bulk content" trash farms yet so it feels more real than even twitter did before the enXhittification.
Elon's lost the plot. It's a joy to watch.
- Implying he ever had it
  
  That's part of the joy, he bought the plot and still managed to lose the plot so quickly it's easy to argue he never had it to begin with.
  
  He paid billions to play himself.
- No he hasn’t, shitter served its purpose, to sway an election.
  
  That's an expensive way to sway an election. If that's the case, critical thinking abilities of the average Xitter user is pretty fucking low. Breaking News: Shepherd Herds Sheep.
Wasn't adding engagement numbers to each tweet one of the first things he added? I remember thinking "who the fuck wants to see that?" But I guess to people like him that was important at the time? Huh.
- Drumpf is obsessed with rally size, skuM is obsessed with twitter engagement. Rotten tomatoh, decomposing tomahto.
What a dipshit
I wonder what thing TrumpEtAL is going to do to require people to create X accounts.

And then what thing that TrumpEtAL will do to make it so that his enemies can't sign up and hence be in trouble with TrumpEtAL.
musk copies feature from zuckerberg backed competitor, threads.

96 comments