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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Great for the fediverse but also weird reason to jump ship. All the other bullshit was fine, but "whoa they changed the logo now I'm out"?
A lot of people stay because of lingering attachment to the platform. As weird as it is, changing the branding subconsciously tells the human brain "This is a new platform" and that makes switching mentally easier.
You've been considering leaving Twitter for a while, and suddenly one morning the bird has flown and Twitter has left you instead.
I think it's also a clear signal that things are really never going to return to normal, it's only getting worse from here. Which is easy those of us on the outside to observe, but maybe slightly harder from the inside when you still have most of the community still intact and posting.
I think some of us also had hopes that the new CEO would put a leash on Musk and steer Twitter into calmer waters again, but this was just proof that Musk is still doing wtf he wants and the CEO is just there for show. So people have now abandoned their last bit of hope and therefore abandoned T...I mean X as well.
While I haven't been an active user in a longer time, I've still been a very active lurker until Musk took over. By now, I've only checked Twitter every now and then when bored, to see what happened (as I mostly used Twitter as some kind of news feeds for stuff I couldn't easily follow in any other way). But today I started migrating off completely - going through my follow list one by one and finding ways to follow those things (like local police, local town, local zoo, etc.) in other ways.
For some that means slower news, or only the most important news - which kinda sucks, as e.g. local police info were good to have in real time during major events or when there was some protest going on. For some this even means mailing lists, ugh.
And a few I couldn't replace at all, so I'll miss out on those news. Sucks, but hopefully those people/entities will provide their news feed through some better means sometime now.
The CEO is there to fail: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
wall of text to say puppet non-white male CEOs ride failing companies into ground and get blamed. yet they do it anyway. scroll finger hyperactive syndrome flare-up
I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.
The stages of grief don't have to go in that order. People can be angry at Twitter and then jump to acceptance that its never going back. No fast tracking needed.
I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.
When spez doubled down and Reddit imploded i moved to lemmy. I also discovered mastodon. But then i realized the reason i used twitter was to follow certain people/accounts none of which are on mastodon.
We had a reason to ditch Reddit, because they forced everyone off our beloved third party apps. But twitter didn't have this kind of meltdown. Im only a consumer on Twitter, and its still working fine. No reason to quit. The rate limit is dumb but it isn't the end of the world.
Yup Twitter was for following people and Reddit was for following topics. Lemmy with all the new users is pretty much viable for big topics now but Mastodon doesn't magically have all the people I want to follow just because it's a better format.
some dignity might be enough reason to leave it
Couldn't agree more. I was a fail whale era twitter user. Wayyyyy early user. I ditched it a little bit before musk actually, but I still ended up seeing threads here and there because of Reddit.
Just today I landed on a Twitter thread, saw that x and it was like, strangely repulsing...I wanted to get the hell out of there asap
Elon rate limits tweets
Elon changes the logo
I've already had several non-tech people say something along the lines of "What the heck is this X thing on my phone?"
I gotta wonder how many other people are just impulse uninstalling something they don't recognize off their phone as well, since ol' Musky boi did this with basically zero user notice as well.
I had a similar thought. Non-techies are going to open up Twitter and see a different logo but it the text still says Twitter and think they're on a phishing site.
Bass pro shops social media > Twitter/X
The blue bird was the last thing they had left
I think a good amount of it is also "the straw that broke the camel's back." Twitter users have been taking abuse after abuse. Like many others have stated, they use Twitter to follow specific people. If those people aren't on other platforms, then they're going to stay. But after a certain point, the cost becomes too high. Now the platform is rebranded and now it looks as alien as it's begun to feel. I think that's why so many are once again leaving. Before they could just ignore everything else going on and try to move on with their day. Not there's a big, fat X reminding them of how much they're starting to/already hate the platform now.
Renaming Twitter to 𝕏 is probably the straw that break the camel's back to those people.
I'd like to think it's people finally realizing "Holy shit he IS an idiot" but that might be too optimistic
Because tweeting and being on Twitter is culturally relevant. Twxing and being on =..,,,/''''°°X°°""/,,,...= is sad and cringe.
People run away from things which are sad and cringe.
Threads would like to have a word
The logo change has brought out a new wave of articles and tweets about it, and people go "oh no that's right I'm on twitter! Well THIS is the final straw! Thank goodness there were all these hate articles and tweets that reminded me I was supposed to be angry!"
Also, many of the people who "jump ship" are right back on Twitter within a week. mastodon.social has an entire graveyard of celebrity accounts that haven't been posted to in months because the outraged celebrities just went back to twitter.
I'm happy for Mastodon (I run a fediverse instance and the more users there are the more chances of interesting people and the like), and some of those people do realize they like the vibe more and stay, and a lot of those bumps are significant for the platform. The thing is, we're talking a few hundred thousand, maybe a million accounts of 200 million daily active users on twitter.
Remember why Ray Kroc wanted McDonald's... because of the name/brand. Anybody could make a hamburger/shake shop or shack but he had to have the name because the name was a seller.
Nobody thinks X is cool other than Elon musk and him switching to it is another signifier of how uncool Twitter has become. Every little thing adds to the flow of traffic to the exit.
It's like watching an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where every single decision they make is a bad decision. And it's hilarious.
people do weird things
This will be one of the first "in your face" things that is immediately noticable by a finicky user base that only understands and associates value to popular brands. Musk just removed the popular and familiar brand that people are comfortable with, so why would those people stay?
None of it was fine, people have been browsing for alternatives ever since Elon Musk took over.
At most, many hoped things would ultimately stay the same, which they definitely didn't. The biggest hurdle is that a lot of people there are waiting for their friends and favorite content creators to pick what place they will move to, and content creators are extra hesitant because they don't know if they will have as much following and reach as they used to. I see a bunch of smaller creators pretty much mourning their careers.
Made a mastodon account yesterday mainly out of curiosity. Never been to Twitter.
So they might be counting just me lol
And probably won't matter much.
This user surge will probably go crawling right back in a week or two.
Every surge will retain more people as every surge brings more content.
That's true. I just don't expect this one to be quite so consequential as the others.