X’s decline laid bare…

Last updated on August 30, 2024

*UPDATED WITH NEW NEWS AND EXTRA INFORMATION*

I haven’t posted much the last week or so as we have had a friend who has been very poorly which has taken up a large part of my time! But another reason is that, well, most of the news this year (2024) has been negative surrounding social media. Posting negative stuff is just a draining experience and nothings seems to be more negative at the moment is the ongoing saga around X/Twitter which has been dying slowly since Mr Musk took it over. So here is a post with a few things that have been going on recently with the once popular platform!

X/Twitter has repeatedly tried hard to slash costs – I had lots of articles to choose here but these 2 are the best at showing what this relentless cost cutting means, especially in regard to the service, and whilst it all seems impressive you have to remember that it still seems X is losing money despite everyone at the company saying this isn’t so.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/xtwitter-reduce-annual-cloud-bill-60-what-cost-vorcis-opphe

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/server-maker-sues-elon-musks-x-for-not-paying-for-hardware-wiwynn-claims-over-dollar61m-in-unpaid-hardware-bills

Of course those are 2 things not being paid, but it appears that X is being sued a lot, reports saying upwards of 10,000 legal cases of payment not being made are common. The results of this are easily seen, the common platform issues, spaces not working (Trump v Musk for example) and outages in countries lasting a day or 2. Now this is all well and good, cost saving are being made, but also the user base is plummeting. It is estimated that Threads has almost 3 times the daily users that X now has…. with (of course) the result that losses widen!

Of course another pressing issue is as advertising revenue plummets. Now this isn’t just happening at X but industry wide, I have written about the ad laden tinternet a few times, and well, it isn’t going away and it annoys a very large majority of users. Advertisers leaving, Musk suing them, they leave in even greater numbers… you can see where this will lead to. The amount of people paying to be blue tick verified is also dropping as the platform becomes less and less relevant.

Now suing advertisers AFTER you told them to go F! themselves seems, well, rather petty – like the kid taking his football home because he is losing the game! It also smacks of closing the barn door after the horse is in the next county… but hey! Elons on the game isn’t he!

Finally we come to the free speech conundrum. Having always said it’s about free speech and then censoring users basically at will – X was “forced” to reveal who invested in the takeover, and, well, to be fair it’s a great bunch of weirdos. The list includes Putin supporters, Piffy Duff (or whatever his name is this week), Jack Dorsey and well it seems a bit strange. Of course this is why the list was revealed by a court order!

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-investors-elon-musks-x-revealed-court-filing-1942970

It has also come to light recently that the deal to buy Twitter (now X) has been called the worst deal in Wall Street since the financial crisis! Now that is going some isn’t it? The deal has gone sour because of the rapid demise of the companys fortunes, yet Musk insists the company is doing well….

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-buyout-officially-161518178.htm

Now it also appears that Musk has chosen to ignore a judge in Brazil and that his company is fully expecting to be banned in that country. Now, on the surface, this appears to be a simple thing. Elon doesn’t like being told what to do, and yes he has history for throwing his dummy out of the pram, but this is a bit more than that. A ban in Brazil matters little in the grand scheme of things, yet this pettiness has once again brought an exodus from the platform with people trusting it to be around less and less. I have seen lots of people moving away yet again, and this can only hurt the bottom line – something that has been mentioned several times in this post! You can only lose peoples trust for so long before the platform just ceases to be relevant, but more importantly used in any numbers. It is hard to say how bad this will be, but from what I am hearing the platform is now way down on the list of used platforms in terms of traffic AND users. In my experience I get less people to my websites now from X/Twitter than FB, Threads, LinekedIN AND Bluesky. That has gotta hurt!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg41n533zno

So there we go – but of course the most damning thing I can say is that the majority of people who were X supporters that I know personally have either left or no longer use the platform much. The result is more fragmentation and more platforms, which is a double-edged sword. You have to either post on as many platforms as you can stomach, or limit what you see to a couple or perhaps even 1. If you are a creator, of course this means some tough choices, and many seem to be taking the “easy” way out and creating far less. Sad times all around then….