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A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.
This was true even before Elon Musk's purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn't function the way it used to.
Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network "U.S. state-affiliated media," a designation that was at odds with Twitter's own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR's newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.
Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR's main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, "the platform's algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform," the memo says.
There's one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. "It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount," says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn't just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it's not impossible to replace.
[...] These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.
There were signs of social media's waning importance before the Twitter sale as well as predictions that the era of social media-driven news is coming to an end. But changes to X in the last year have only accelerated these trends, underlining that social media is less rewarding to publishers and less fun for users than it used to be. "The quality of our engagement on the platform was also suffering" before April, Nett wrote in a followup email. "We were on average seeing fewer impressions and smaller reach on our tweets, despite keeping a similar publishing cadence. And I know this is anecdotal, but as someone looking at the account every day, spam replies were getting much more frequent — starting to overpower meaningful feedback and conversation from audiences." Musk's now-retracted relabeling of NPR could be seen as a last straw, or as an open door to leave a platform that had lost its utility.
By many estimates, active daily users on Twitter/X are in decline. Not everyone who leaves does it like NPR, in a flurry of headlines and with a final post pinned to their timeline. Instead, it's more mundane. They check less and less often, finding it less useful, less compelling. It's not easy to decide to back away; there's still a fear about leaving — a fear of missing out on a great conversation or a new joke. But as a platform becomes less reliable — either editorially or technically — staying becomes more fraught. And as NPR has demonstrated, you may not be giving up all that much if you walk away.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Friday December 27 2024, @11:09PM (8 children)
Twitter? When was ever Twitter relevant anyways? Personally I literally don't know anyone at all who has/had Twitter or ever refered anything on Twitter, ever. I know many who use and talk about Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Whatsapp, Telegram. But zero Twitter.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday December 28 2024, @12:39AM (6 children)
I'm not sure, I remember early on there was a lot of discussion of what it was even for. I seem to remember the folks over at Penny Arcade suggesting that it was for tweeting your bowel movements. And there used to be a great account from the mime that would log in to periodically post "...".
But, really, the whole thing never made that much sense as the limit early on was short enough to fit into a text message, but it was like this massive group text where pretty much anybody could hop on. And even when you can select reasonable people to add to group texts, they often times have so many issues, even without randos showing up to troll.
It's a format that could be somewhat useful for status reports on what you're home automation stuff is up to, but anything much more involved that that really depends on a much longer message length than whatever it is that they eventually lengthened it to.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 28 2024, @03:08PM (3 children)
So many MySpaces and Geocities today...
Donald Trump is a mixture of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, multiplied by ten.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday December 28 2024, @04:52PM (2 children)
Take that back, Geocities at least had some stuff of value.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 29 2024, @07:09PM (1 child)
True, but like the entire internet today, most of what was there was garbage.
Donald Trump is a mixture of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, multiplied by ten.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday December 29 2024, @08:09PM
Yes, but at least it was garbage by regular people who were either just messing around or going after smaller audiences. It wasn't being shaped by ridiculous algorithms designed to extract as much rent as possible via scam ads and malware.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by One Time Use on Saturday December 28 2024, @08:32PM (1 child)
Only use I found was as a song request mechanism for a DJ (disk jockey) bot that I wrote circa 2009. It accepted song requests via Twitter and queued up mp3s.
It worked okay as a way for people at a party to influence the music selection. But, people often don't know the name of a song, just a catchy part of the lyrics. And they're lousy spellers...especially if they've been drinking.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday December 28 2024, @09:38PM
That might work a bit better these days as an AI program could probably work out a lot of the common lyrics that people use to refer to songs. It kind of surprises me sometimes that while a bunch of songs do have their name somewhere in the song, it's not universal and a bunch of songs wind up with a parenthetical to include the unofficial name that listeners use.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 28 2024, @02:01AM
jan 6th.