Originally published at: Far too many of Musk's followers and Twitter's users appear fake; advertisers may never return | Boing Boing
…
6 Likes
What I love about it is that the numbers also seem to be saying that even the followers of Musk that are real are people that barely use Twitter
Which is the audience you want to build your business on /s
24 Likes
yeah. from the article:
The median number of followers for all 153 million accounts following Musk is just one (1) single follower.
not very social for a social media company
20 Likes
Functionally, that guy is living in his own simulation.
23 Likes
What a shocker! It’s almost as if Elno’s takeover has actually worsened the bot problem (but he doesn’t actually care), and caused real users to use the service even less than they were before! (This really bodes well for his “turn Twitter into an everything app” - it’s a dumb thing to try to do with Twitter, premised on the idea that “everyone” was already on the app. But if you alienate the users, before you even start driving them away by turning Twitter into something else entirely, well…)
To be fair, a good number of accounts that look like real people… are also bots. Though when they added view counts to Tweets, people were comparing the counts to the number of ostensible followers they had (who, in theory, would be seeing all their recent tweets), and realizing that only a small fraction of Twitter accounts were still active. (And that was ignoring the fact that the view counts were inflated.) The whole thing is already far more of a ghost-town than anyone is publicly admitting.
15 Likes
The Emperor’s new bots.
19 Likes
I’m surprised that the company didn’t set up their bots to follow each other.
11 Likes
I am repeating myself, but not too long and Musk will be the only human left on Twitter (or whatever it’ll be called by then). AI systems will communicate with him as some sort of reverse Turing test.
9 Likes
It’s really upsetting. Old Twitter was my favorite place. It had comedians, and scientists, and artists, and various professions, and goofy parody accounts, all posting awesome stuff. I loved it.
The slide started with Gamergate, then overzealous cancellations, and it really turned to shit with Trump/MAGA and all the COVID disinformation. But I was hoping the platform could come back.
Then Elon came along, fscked it all up, and I think that sucks.
12 Likes
Also predicated on the idea that no one would care that he’s let it become a Nazi bar. If you’re having a meeting/party/conference/discussion and can have it in a bar/hotel with a Nazi bar or anywhere else, anyone who isn’t a Nazi is going to choose anywhere else.
3 Likes
It was special. The way you could come across anyone in there because they posted something interesting or amusing, start learning about their work, hobbies or interests when you didn’t realise you wanted to know that, so wouldn’t have gone searching for that information.
4 Likes
Yep. The hashtag was a genius idea.
4 Likes
I don’t think the true size of the audience is the main problem. He’s acknowledging he built a Nazi bar, and nobody wants to advertise in it.
X will soon allow brands to block ads from appearing next to specific profiles.
Nobody I know has ever said they will only go to a Nazi bar if they can sit at a table with no Nazis. That’s not how it works.
16 Likes
Especially now that the Nazis can just come over and sit at your table, join in the conversation and you can’t make them leave.
You can, of course, just go to another bar.
14 Likes
Surely anyone using twitter to receive their daily dose of Elon Musk Thought is now a ‘highest and best purpose’ user.
3 Likes
So it’s up to the advertisers to monitor Twitter/X to make sure their ads don’t appear next to racist content and block those profiles one by one? Boy, what an offer.
14 Likes
Well, if you can’t trust them to give you a Nazi-nonadjacent location for your ads, what else could you possibly do?
If only there was a way to make sure your ads don’t end up on Twitter next to a Nazi…hmm. It’s quite a conundrum.
11 Likes
We’re overlooking the possibility that these are all losers with no friends. For that group. this is as social as the media gets.
2 Likes
Twitter’s end won’t come soon enough. Far too much time and resources have been devoted to a social media site that does not further civil society.
May whackadoodle Musk go down with it.
5 Likes
