Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analystslocked

Chris Remington@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 264 points –
Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts
nbcnews.com
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The elongated muskrat is learning first hand how the Nazi Bar Problem works

excuse me but what the fuck is the nazi bat problem

You have a bar: Nazi comes into your bar, you let him stay, because why not its just a single nazi. Nazi invites friends, those friends invite their friends, and so on. Now you a have nazi bar.

So, basically, if you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerant will eventually wipe out tolerance.

A more accurate way to say it is, "if you tolerate the intolerant BEING intolerant, intolerance will eventually wipe out tolerance."

It does not say you should be intolerant of the intolerant while they're minding their own business. I just think a bar owner is free to kick people out for representing Nazis purely because it's their bar and they can do what they want.

But X's problem is a bit different from the Nazi Bar problem, in that you don't really see the Neo Nazis on X sitting there minding their own business. You ONLY see them voicing their intolerance. Which of course, should not be tolerated.

Tolerate tolerate tolerate. There.

It does not say you should be intolerant of the intolerant while they’re minding their own business

it is a fallacy that the intolerant mind their own business. being intolerant is, itself, an active state, not a passive one, and one to be actively resisted. being intolerant involves choice, a choice to be intolerant. there is no "minding one's own business" in being intolerant, as being intolerant necessarily involves minding the business of others and then making the choice to react to it.

so your argument is, itself, spurious for it is fallacious in its foundation.

gtfo with your nazi apologism

The Paradox of Tolerance

Tolerate tolerate tolerate. There.

gtfo with your nazi apologism

That was so fast, you make me rub my temples in pain, my guy.

So, people are people, they aren't their ideals. People have more than one state of mind, they aren't 2D cardboard cutouts (or drawings of red skull). Life would be easier if they were, I agree, but the world is more complex than that.

People are born into environments they have no control over. People are handed ideals before they know what they are. People learn from their environment. People change their minds about things. You literally wouldn't bother commenting right now if you didn't agree with me.

If a person is sitting peacefully, let them. If a person is taking any action to impede any other person's ability to sit peacefully, then stop them. But don't attack a person who is sitting peacefully, because they'll probably want to attack you, or someone else, back.

Now call me a nazi again, and we can agree to disagree. Jfc.

That was so fast, you make me rub my temples in pain, my guy.

Good

People are born into environments they have no control over

Nobody is born a Nazi. That is a choice someone makes. And it’s a choice that has consequences.

If a person is sitting peacefully

Being a Nazi isn’t “peaceful.” There is no “peaceful” state of being a Nazi. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom taught the world that 1936 when he tried to leave Nazi Germany sitting peacefully alone.

gtfo with you Nazi apologism

The difference between us is, I want Nazis to renounce their Nazi-ism. You don't.

I don't believe you'll always be this way. I believe you can change. Godspeed.

The difference between us is, I want Nazis to renounce their Nazi-ism. You don’t.

you've made another mistake: assuming you can read my mind. you can't, of course. and, in making that assumption, not only were you wrong, you came to the wrong conclusion-- it'd be thrilled if Nazis renounced their beliefs.

However, in the meantime, neither they nor their beliefs should be tolerated, and you haven't made any argument that compels me to believe otherwise.

and attacking me personally rather than my argument is a pretty weak ad hominem fallacy, as i've demonstrated. so is using the straw man argument about "changing their beliefs" rather than what we were discussing: tolerating them.

I don’t believe you’ll always be this way. I believe you can change

i suggest you stick with the facts rather than beliefs and logical fallacies. they make for a better argument.

gtfo with your nazi apologism

Nazi's whole ideology is that they see themselves better than everyone else and they are willing to kill the "lesser beings" in order to make the world "pure".

It is literally the genocide ideology.

There are no good Nazi's, because if a Nazi was good, they wouldn't be a Nazi.

Nazism—the attempt to organize the commission of genocide—is an act of violence and must always be responded to as such.

Nazism is never minding its own business.

A more accurate way to say it is, "if you tolerate the intolerant BEING intolerant, intolerance will eventually wipe out tolerance."

If the intolerant could mind their own business and tolerate people they didn't agree with, they literally wouldn't be part of the intolerant. That's the point: it's a core part of who they are and we have to cut it out like a cancer to have a tolerant society. (Sorry for making you read the T-word so many times.)

excuse me but what the fuck is the nazi bat problem

When you find a nazi but you can't find a bat.

Speaking of Nazis, are you able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Nazi activity on X?

Or is it more of a feeling you have?

He’s making X into a “whites only” platform. What did he expect?

I remain convinced he's killing it on purpose. I don't know a plausible motive, but I guarantee it's on purpose.

I used to think so too, but I don't know if he is also bad at that because it is taking him longer than I expected.

If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.

Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).

So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?

The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don't mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.

So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?

Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn't need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don't want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can't be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn't care about the in-group.

So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they'd try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.

So what can you do if you don't want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don't buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.

The problem with this narrative is that Musk lost money doing so.

I agree he’s killing it on purpose. Something to do with information control.

His meeting so long at the Superbowl with Rupert Murdoch in his suite sure didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

You think conspiracy theories in general sound reasonable, don't you

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When the only people I saw there were the leftest lefties I ever saw... then he just alienated all of them

Elon is a very odd duck, and not at all in a good way.

He’s making X into a “whites only” platform

Is there some evidence of this outrageous claim or it is just something that sounded cool in your head?

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With so many options becoming available, increasingly less people will select the platform preferred by Nazis.

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Twitter is for fascists & their sympathizers.

My wife insists she's staying there for the news and legal people she follows and she has a point. A lot of government, business, and schools continue to use it as an easy way to broadcast information.

Threads pulled off some celebrities, Bsky some policy and legal wonks, and Mastodon the tech geeks. If these services all start federating together and offering unified text and hashtag search, then where you land won't matter.

Until then, it'll be hard to get people to switch away, even with all the bad press.

If these services all start federating together

No one should federate with meta.

I never liked Twitter to begin with, once it became an unabashed environment for hate it was a piece of cake to close my account.

At least thats kind of reassuring in a way, that part of it is people dont want to associate with that stuff. (Though I realize that isnt the only reason)

He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.

Yes, this is what happens when you take a big shit in people's cereal. They tend to leave. I, too, could be an analyst.

Yeah telling your advertising megacustomers to go F.. themselves on TV and naming them explicitly. Wow. That's some kind of nasty.

It totally proved Disney right, too.

It's morbid but the only use it has to me is info on live shitty events.

I only follow specific youtubers and artists. If stray away from my specific feed, Twitter is too scary lol. I am at a loss for good social media though. It seems like most social media sites have just gotten worse over the past decade.

I guess there's pros an cons to it all. Pro: less time wasted on social media Con: I've missed out on some information that is sometimes good to know.

So at what point does/did it reach death spiral?

There's probably a sociology theory that would apply, but my guess would be a loss of 33% of active users over the course of 6 months.

When the “large” voices leave in significant numbers - in the UK it is used wildly by public sector and charity organisations, there are official governmental Twitter accounts, all the broadcasters have accounts.

Really wish I could convince local government entities to switch to Mastodon - my local police said it was "subject to O.P.R.A." and needed to meet retention rules (if you rolled your own...), and the state wildfire commission said they were looking at Threads :/

So instead, both are still stuck on the platform that requires a login to see posts and filled with nazis.

I think Threads federation may actually help with. I’m trying to persuade a health body at the moment to switch from Twitter and to roll their own Mastodon instance, based on the fact that what they really want is the widget on the website, control of their data and the ability to reach people.

Twitter has already screwed the widget with the login/authentication requirements. If
Threads actually allows its users to see Mastodon posts, that’s a big old reachable audience.

Like when a US President was banned? Was that an example of those “big voices” leaving the platform?

the death spiral is in progress, elon's just rich so he can pay bills (or let leases go resulting in eviction...) for a while

So at what point does/did it reach death spiral?

It isn't so much a spiral as it is a series of 90 degree turns.

X will be dead any day now people! Any day now!

Yeah people keep posting these articles and celebrating as if it's not still a very relevant social media platform. I am concerned it will take so long to "die" that there might actually be time for a revival.

It seems Twitter isn't the only one on the decline trend. Good job, burgerlanders.

I stopped using it when squacker stopped working, though I don't think I'm in that statistic because I never had a twitter account.