Comment on Twitter / X is losing daily active users. CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it.
drekly@lemmy.world 1 year agoBut 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.
luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
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.