I think the core issue is that despite how stupid and shitty it's become and seems intent on continuing to become, Twitter is still Twitter and Twitter users don't want BlueSky or Threads, they want Twitter which is still Twitter despite Elon and co's best efforts.
Also the ability for users to fact-check ads is still hilarious and entertaining which almost offsets the amount of ads.
It also seem to be dying user wise outside of some communities, but I think it's will be like the death of Facebook. Slow, and due to network effects never complete. Through it has much less network effects then Facebook had (no family main communication, old now distant friend main communication etc.).
Or do we have a good reason to believe the active user counts posted by Elon and others are fake?
but there is a huge difference between "active user who wants to use it" and "active user who wants to not use it but due to network effects can't"
It's kinda a similar situation like with Facebook (and just Facebook, not Meta in general).
- they have some loyal groups (e.g. Facebook people broadly around 60 and older)
- they lost any interest (and much goodwill) from many other groups
- but due the various network effects many of the "lost interest" people still have it and might still count as active users depending on definition of active (but in practice they are passive not active users, unwilling to spend money on it, unwilling to give it any information about themself and not necessary the best ad targets either as there is a risk of you company being associated with "that annoying thing they would which to just discard".
Just with the difference that with Twitter most of the "passive" users are still active because they haven't found an alternative to be active on YET
You see this in the way high-ish follower count folks are constantly pruning their follows to signal some kind of ratio. I guess that signal produces some outcome.
HN’s staying power as just about the best forum of remotely general interest might have a lot to do with there not being followers (along with a crack team of elite mods and other things). You can rack up karma but it’s a side quest, join date matters a bit on a boundary condition, but mostly there’s not really any raw fame factor outside a few hyper-famous folks.
I wonder if there’s any scalability past HN size on that.
it doesn't help that Threads through their action already kinda made it clear that their compatibility with mastodon and co. falls in the "embrace extend extinguish" category
and just by the fact that Threads is from Meta it can't be Twitter 2.0, to many people refuse to use meta products of any kind as much as possible as they fundamentally do not trust Meta at all
