What a terrible graph. That "huge" spike is a mere 0.5% increase. That might as well be noise.
Don't believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.
Don’t believe any graph whose y-axis starts at any value but 0 people.
This one is pretty bad but that is definitely not the right lesson to take from it. The one thing it does show us is that approximately 20k extra new users suddenly showed up compared to the trend, and that would be much more difficult to see if the relevant axis did start at zero. The bigger problem is that it shows too short a time span. It's not clear how unusual this event was, or if it happens every week.
The other weird thing is that bottom-right axis does start at zero for some reason. I'm guessing it might somehow be trying to indicate "toots" specifically made by those new users? But that's not how it's labelled and it seems unlikely they could have that data.
Both right axes start at zero. They're the important part of the graph.
If you talk about a new wave of users, then the number of users is also important, really important
Actually praying for the corporate/political astroturf campaigns to work this time. Just this once
Honestly the Twitter thing has been great for shifting the internet zeitgeist in a decidedly fuck-billionaires direction. The material suffering was obviously already here in abundance, but now the shittiness has come to the home of the people who are comfortable enough to keep posting through the growing poverty around them, and they rightfully hate it.
Elon didn't say he would charge all the X/Twitter users. The media just made that up.
Good for Mastodon, though.
Elon didn’t say he would charge all the X/Twitter users.
What do you mean by that? He didn't say he was definitely going to do so right now, but he proposed it with quite some degree of seriousness. I don't intend to watch the whole video with Netanyahu to make sure what he said exactly, but all the articles I've seen are too detailed and explicit for it to be just an aside that the media blew out of proportion.
You're telling me an industry that profits off viewership might occasionally put wrong information in a headline to get more attention?
There has got to he some other narrative going on here. Is there a super profitable way for him to declare x bankrupt or something?
I find it really difficult to believe there is any benefit to him buying and killing Twitter for billions of dollars. It would have to be extremely contrived and possibly a really well kept conspiracy.
We know there's no benefit to him here because a court forced him to go through with the purchase after he tried to back out. He did not want this mess.
Yeah at first it appears it was a major screw up but the screw ups keep coming so i wonder.
Even before Twitter was purchased it was in a really delicate balancing act of profitability. Any misstep that seemed slightly too much had advertisers and users leaving and the opposite meant Twitter couldn't make a profit. Perhaps anyone purchasing Twitter would tip that scale with anything they tried, but Elon here instead of walking back his decisions when they don't work keeps doubling down.
Twitter doesn't generate profits:
Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.
If anyone wants to nitpick over the 2/10 years when they reported profitability, consider the real value of getting in the black twice in company history in an environment where you're gearing up for a an IPO. The long-term trend is clearly that this is not a viable business model.
The benefit is controlling the public narrative. Think about it, how many news media companies get business from Twitter? And now he has the power to suppress their reach or to even kick them off the platform altogether.
I agree that is a really valuable position to be in, but you would still need to maintain your reputation or else they could all leave. The website itself is mostly insignificant and its popularity has everything to do with its reputation and userbase.
It was from an interview with the PM of Israel, where Elon stated they will introduce "lower tier pricing" for premium. There is no mention of charging everyone to use X.
At 34:40
https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1703806204894498966?t=hoV3axpQWwWNmwQ8yPu65Q&s=19
