By now, you may have heard about Elon Musk's handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, and her disastrous interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at Vox Media's Code 2023 event. However, somewhat overlooked amid some of the more viral moments of the discussion, Yaccarino dropped some previously unknown stats that don't exactly paint such a rosy picture for the company:
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing daily active users under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Speaking at Vox Media's Code 2023 tech conference earlier this week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.
According to a series of tweets that Musk himself posted in November of last year, Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users the week before his takeover in late November of last year.
Following the conference, X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users, according to The Information. Before specifically saying X had 225 million active users, Yaccarinno previously cited "200 to 250 million" daily active users earlier in the interview.
However, even X's revised number of 245 million daily active users would still see X lose millions or around 3.7 percent of daily active users from before Musk's acquisition.
In fact, daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. According to the aforementioned Musk tweet, Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. Compared to the daily active users Twitter was pulling late last year under Musk's leadership, X has shed nearly 15 million users – a drop of roughly 5.6 percent.
Twitter first started sharing this metric, which the company refers to as monetizable daily active users or mDAU, years before Musk even planned to buy the company. The reason? Twitter's daily active user numbers were reliably more favorable for the company than its other metrics when it shared its quarterly reports for investors and shareholders.
When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users. She then moved the discussion to the platform's Communities feature, the company's answer to Facebook Groups, saying X had 50,000 communities and that engagement numbers and time spent in those communities were up since June.
Along with the daily active user metrics, Yaccarino also shared that X now has a record 550 million monthly active users. This would be up from the 541 million "monthly users" metric that Musk shared in a post in July.
It's unclear, however, just how much of the monthly active user growth has happened under Musk when compared to how the company was doing prior to his takeover. That's because in 2019, Twitter stopped reporting this number in favor of the daily active user metric. The company entered that year with 321 million monthly active users, the last publicly reported monthly active user metric directly from Twitter.
It should be noted that Musk has shifted away from both the daily and monthly active user numbers in favor of "unregretted user minutes," a metric seemingly made-up by Musk.
Because all the other people they care about are on there too. And they won't leave because all the other people they care about are on there too. And theh...
It's a form of interdependence, in a way. Those who rely on Ex-Twitter as a platform to broadcast their microblogs (be that a tech service proviser using it to report on ongoing system outages, a content creator promoting some new content or a news outlet, well, announcing news) are reluctant to migrate while their audience is still there. The audience, in turn, is gonna be relauctant to move away from the platform their service providers, news outlets and content creators use.
The more people make that leap, the stronger the encouragement will be for the rest to leap as well, but the other issue is "where to?" There are multiple competitors, and particularly between BlueSky and Mastodon, the decision apparently isn't as straightforward as it may seem for those of us that are already entrenched in the fediverse. I'd like to believe Mastodon wins out in the end, but it's not so clear cut for some of the people I talked to.
Plenty of people want to leave, but between the things holding them back and the daunting question of "where to?", they're afraid to. As things start to shift, competitors emerge and trends become visible, more and more may decide to finally jump ship, but that's going to take time.
But 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.
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.