Why YSK:

Although politicians and journalists often treat it like major platform, or even the “digital town square,” X is fairly minor social media platform. The various Meta platforms (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger) have combined 10 billion monthly active users. X (Twitter) is about 5.5% that size. It trails behind not only the obvious giants like Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok (Douyin), but also well behind platforms that are exclusive to one country or region, like WeChat or Weibo, and behind “also-rans” like Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest.

X is not a major platform. It has continued to struggle with outages, trolling, user exodus, and now a little more than an Internet ghost town.

  • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
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    5 hours ago

    The difference is every journalist in the world is addicted to twitter and everything spoken or written about in the news is just what they were talking about on twitter yesterday

    • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
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      26 minutes ago

      Which is why I don’t bother to watch the news anymore. I can go straight to the source. I read some print news and that’s about it.

  • boaratio@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I interviewed at a company in San Francisco that split an office space with Pinterest, and I casually asked during the interview if anyone actually uses Pinterest and the HR person said that the company I was interviewing with was moving to another location because Pinterest bought the entire building. This was a huge building in downtown San Francisco. I still don’t know who uses Pinterest, but apparently a lot of people use it.

  • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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    6 hours ago

    It’s the accessibility factor that’s important. It’s called the “digital town square” not just because of the user count (which isn’t high compared to Facebook or Whatsapp) but because of how easy it is to access. Musk’s changed that and now you need to log in to see some (all?) xeets, but… most of the social media on that chart requires login and/or app, I think reddit is the most notable exception (or was, now they also require login to use the web frontend I guess). But then reddit requires you to actually click on the posts, which is more effort, whereas xitter just shows you everything in your feed, so if a politician or celebrity’s xeet is in it, you’re seeing it.

    Idk, there’s just something about it that screams it’s better for announcements and such than most other social media platforms.

  • Bleys@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    For some reason Twitter specifically is like black tar heroin to politicians. Even post-Musk, left wing politicians like AOC and Bernie are still giga active on the platform.

    • unglueclass23@programming.dev
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      11 hours ago

      Niche content that either is hard to find elsewhere or you will be using something like TikTok which is in no way better.

  • percent@infosec.pub
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    16 hours ago

    🤔 Even after reading the “Why YSK” section, I still don’t know what to do with this information. Maybe I’m missing something that should be obvious? I’ve never been much of a social media guy

    • Focal@pawb.social
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      12 hours ago

      I think a lot of people are struggling to make the switch because “everyone is on twitter”. A YSK like this might help people see that it really isn’t true, and you can absolutely make the switch.

      • Tja@programming.dev
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        10 hours ago

        Make the switch… to Facebook? Or Instagram? Because you might have noticed, fediverse (or even bluesky) don’t even show up there…

        • Focal@pawb.social
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          9 hours ago

          Yeah, you raise a good point there. I am not a huge social media person either, so I was kind of under the impression that instagram would be at the very least a little bit better than twitter, but I concede that it’s entirely based on vibes.

          Maybe it’s for advertisers or start-ups who want to figure out where the biggest audience is?

          But then again, how do we know these numbers aren’t just bots?

          Guess it’s a weird side thing for me. On the one hand, I probably won’t use this knowledge for anything, but I’m glad to have heard it, if nothing else. Weird.

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      12 hours ago

      No, if you don’t use it, you’re not missing anything.

      It’s the users, advertisers, investors and politicians, who should know if they still believe it to be an important platform.

    • nullify3112@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Fediverse monthly active users has been going down. I’m starting to notice my Mastodon feed not having the people I follow anymore, because of they consolidated their alternative social media in Bluesky only.

  • bandanawearingbanana@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Good riddance honestly.

    Even when Jack was managing that shithole it was still a shithole. Magnitudes better than the nuclear wasteland it is now but a shithole none the less.

    Btw the embeddedscience.org article you linked is, at least partly Ai generated.

    • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      I assumed it was a dying platform but then I found out why it’s so popular again - kids uae it as a backdoor to access TikTok/Youtube shortform content.

    • joe@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      The only “social network” my teenager has asked permission to make an account on is Pinterest.

      I was a little confused at the request, because in my mind Pinterest was a defunct site that no one used, but apparently it’s popular with at least some of the younger generation.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        I’ve come around slightly on Pinterest. Not fully–it’s still vapid and there’s a lot of attempted lock-in–but there is some good stuff on there, and its attempt at curating creativity is kind of refreshing.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    I love looking at stuff like this and not knowing what half of these things are.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Pinterest is a social network?
    I kind of feel the same about YouTube, but I do know they have comments at least…