Bonum Certa Men Certa

Elon Musk Killed Not Only the Twitter Bird, He Also Killed the Platform

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 01, 2024

Chickadee: An adorable Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) on an branch with green in the background.

Today begins the second half of 2024 (2024 H2). Let's look back at Twitter, which is the primary platform Wikileaks and many others tactlessly outsourced to (typically well before the "software enshittification").

First, some analysis from other sites and professional surveyors:

Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests

Twitter Traffic on Downward Trend Since Elon Musk's Takeover

Twitter usage in US ‘fallen by a fifth’ since Elon Musk’s takeover

It is consistently like this. In 2024 H1 X/Twitter traffic only fell further and in 2024 H2 it'll be the same. By 2025 maybe the site will be so financially un-viable (set aside the growing debt) that Musk will simply curse at the advertisers, i.e. his real clients, driving away what's left of them.

Thomson Reuters Foundation wrote: "Data from Chartbeat shows that traffic to news sites from @facebook fell 48% in 2023, with visits from @X down by 27%."

The way to read this is, outsourcing to social control media for instant gratification is like buying a bottle of vodka to become a happy person (getaway or gateway drug). This seemingly alluring, seductive trap for "cheap" or "easy" so-called 'traffic' is more like a honeypot. So why would any sane sites still outsource to social control media? It's a drain. It's stealing the "audiences" from the sites (grafted onto walled gardens) and it only becomes less beneficial over time.

Looking at statCounter for another source of data, Twitter is down from 12% to 8% since the start of last year (down from 17% to 11% in North America, down from 17% to under 4% in South Africa, birthplace of Twitter's owner, but up in Saudi Arabia, which basically bought Twitter through Mr. Musk).

As we said this morning, Twitter (or X) is partly owned by the regime that cuts journalists to small pieces and cooks them. Twitter is already dead. X is next.

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