Comment by ALittleLight

2 years ago

I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it?

I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.

Anecdotally the content in my feed seems to be drying up, with less and less fresh new tweets every time I open the app. Either people are posting less, leaving or there's technical issues around serving content.

in the short term controversy and events drive traffic up. world cup going on, holidays and seasonal traffic, elon chaos. all probably makes twitter looks like a success at the moment. it would be to hard to separate out the traffic i think.

Wasn’t the only mastodon account banned the one that was posting links to the doxer account?

  • No, all links to a variety of Mastodon servers, plus official Mastodon account, plus hashtags mentioning Mastodon... were banned.

    No idea if they still are. I don't hang out on Twitter. But sheesh.

  • It was any server that shared links with the server which hosted that. So mathstodon.xyz, for example, which is where a bunch of math Twitter ran to, and not particularly political, was also hit. Even if you endorse banning links to someone sharing public information, it was an extremely broad brush.

They have lost many of their previous highend brand advertising. I now see almost exclusively advertisting from right wing alt brands like 'black rifle coffee'. One can safely assume that their advertising revenue has taken a huge hit. A few thousand people tossing elon $8 a month isnt going to make up for that.