That’s how many users who use X on a daily basis, not total users. But let’s be strict about it and say ~250M daily active users, and ~688M monthly visitors who are not daily active users. Barely hanging in there.
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An health file of a person can never be anonymous, even if you delete the names. It contains so much information that it only fits onto one specific person. Even if you aggregate data, it is mathematically possible to restore a lot of information about a single person. Giving away personal health data is quite a scandal.
I wonder if doxing is still illegal on Twitter. I still have a lot of phone numbers of politicians. Some might have changes their numbers, but maybe not the lesser known ones. So I could try.
Misinformation. Disinformation. Oh, like the laptop story suppressed as "disinformation" by the prior owners? Oh, like COVID came from a Pangolin kissing a bat? Do you really want to go there? Sure, you can nutpick some freak shows on Twitter now, but before Musk, a lot of the "news" was complete propaganda.
It's cool if you like propaganda--there's a whole lot of that on Bluesky, but I think BlueSky comes with coloring books and puzzles to comfort you when exposed to views you disagree with.
To the extent people left Twitter, a lot of them, including "Apple personalities," left the platform because their blue checks were worthless--they were no longer "famous."
I completely get why The Rock or Tom Cruise or Joe Biden would need a checkmark to identify them as real.
Does anyone who doesn't listen to Apple podcasts know who Stephen Hackett or Jason Snell or John Gruber are?
Hell no, but they got their Blue checkmarks and were Twitter royalty because of that (Brett Terpstra had a check, and I'll bet people on MacRumors don't even know who that is).
Under the new regime, the blue check, originally intended for famous people, went the way of the dodo bird and the fake Apple celebrities, whose blue check was their source of self esteem and status, ran.
Much of it is that simple.
Well not to d-bag this thread up, but since this is related to multiple MBA program case studies including one from HBS, and it has bearing on the thread...
While it's 100% true that the Myspace UI sucked, if the UI were the primary driver, we'd all be using Friendster right now. It had a significantly better UX/UI, and circa 2005, it had boatloads of VC money to go for wide (not restricted) distribution.
And while it did have engineering problems with scaling, the number one reason it lagged behind Myspace was that it didn't offer any real network effect advantages. Facebook on the other hand cleverly started with network effects as its core concept, using "coolness" and the idea of exclusivity to increase adoption by the college kids. Meanwhile, Myspace didn't innovate, and News Corp was completely clueless about what to do with it when they bought it.
It's interesting that everyone forgets Myspace since at its peak it had 300 million users with an estimated 100+ million active in any given month. X has about 600 million active users. When you think about internet penetration and usage in 2007 versus today, that 100M is much, much more impressive than what X has today.
But the fact that everyone forgets Myspace also illustrates the point many have made in this thread — which is that X being huge today doesn't mean much. Does X actually have an ecosystem with network effects as a core part of its business model? Yup. That strength though is also any social company's weakness. The more users and/or advertisers leave for a competitor, the weaker the network effects become for the original company. Network effects create a virtuous cycle, but they also can create a vicious cycle.
Behemoths can and do fail — all the time. Anyone who thinks that user exodus, even in a single digit percentage amount in a year, isn't a ring-the-alarm-bells problem doesn't understand the business and hasn't bothered to think about history.
X's biggest advantage here is that there's no single alternative to pick up the slack from the exodus. Bluesky having 20M users is a ton. (Again, anyone talking about how 600M is so much bigger than 20M has completely missed the point.) But not all of the exodus is going to Bluesky, and the fact that it's such a skewed population means advertisers aren't going to flee X completely.
X's biggest disadvantage is Elon. Super smart guy. Bad CEO, especially for a company like this. (If you're about to tell me he's a good CEO, take a closer look at TSLA's history and why it was the darling of short sellers for so many years.) Since Elon took over, X's ad revenue has been sliced in half — and that's as of a year ago. So advertisers were already fleeing before all of this 2024 stuff.
TL/DR: X has a real problem. If you think it's "too big to fail," well, um, we've heard that line in other industries, and for this industry...well, time to read more than the TL/DR!
You can't just make up what the data means when it explicitly tells you that it's visitors, and not users.
False. Health data can be anonymized.
Secondly, Germany is not giving individual health records out.
Not if you connect the dots. 5 men aged 58 living in City X have specific health issue. One of them had another issue and so on. Health data may contain a lot of information about your habits. For example that you are a smoker. The problem is that there are already a lot of profiles out there. If you connect that with the health data, you can identifiy a person. Employers might secretly try to get access to health data of applicants.
Never underestimate how powerful data is. You can even identify people by their typing pattern on a keyboard. That is like a fingerprint for every person. Some will type a specific combination of letters faster than others. Even a text you write can identify you. So even if you open an anonymous account for a forum like that, a spy agency could find out that it was written by you, if it has enough texts written by you to compare. The arrival of AI will make that worse.
Re-identification is quite a science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
If the aggregate data is complex enough, it can be traced back to single people. It would not be a problem to just count how many people have a certain disease, but in order to find connections of causes and diseases, a more complex graph has to be created. If you for example want to find out how many of the people who got a stroke before the age of 50 had dementia at the age of 70, you can't count those separately.
Yes, please continue to prove why you're not informed enough to have this discussion, and why you deservedly got banned for doxxing.
I left because of the elimination of 3rd party app support and the resulting demand to use the horrifying first party app or website. That, and the wall to wall ads and spam bots.
You are the one who is not informed enough. You only believe the version of the health ministry. Of course they say that people can't be identified. That is a lie tough. It is like a Sodoku puzzle. You just know that in every row, column and 3x3 square each number will appear only once, but with a little extra information you can solve the whole puzzle.
That guy literally said "Datenschutz ist nur etwas für Gesunde" (data privacy is only for healthy people). He created a clear text register of all files about implants in Germany and he all doctor bill are saved in an pseudonymised. The means it will not be hard to find the names of the patients.
Have you even wondered how Google creates such a detailed profile about people even if they use a VPN and a fake name when they are online? Spahn even compares his data collection with the one of Google: https://www.apotheke-adhoc.de/nachrichten/detail/politik/spahn-daten-koennen-menschen-heilen/
Don't get it twisted and don't listen to the excuses.
People left Twitter/X because Elon Musk purchased it, and when he did, all the little cool kids with blue checkmarks lost those checkmarks and were no longer "Twitter Famous."
The rest were all brainwashed to scream DISINFORMATION AND MISINFORMATION, OH NO!
So, half of them were exposed to be nobodies and the other half succumbed to something similar to the Satanic Panic of the 80's/90's.
I was replying to your false statement that users are only leaving because they might encounter something they disagree with. There are many reasons people are - and have been - leaving twitter since Elon's takeover.
BlueSky is nice because it's built like early twitter - just a chronological timeline of people you choose to follow, good blocking tools, and no ads. You don't get screamed at constantly by trolls and bots, and you're allowed to post links. There is, essentially, no algorithmic amplification of content of any kind. Makes it kind of a dead end for hostile actors to weaponize for their gain.
X has the "Following" tab which shows content exclusively from those accounts you choose to follow, allowing the user to tailor the experience to their liking.
You can also set up category tabs of your own making, such as "Film" and "Cats" or whatever, and doing so (and intreating with and liking those posts) will make the algorithm show you more of that kind of content in the For You tab. I also very much like the specific implementation for how word and account muting works on X, where they will show you replies from muted accounts as: "this reply is from an account you muted". This is handy because it allows you to never see content from muted accounts accidentally, but always when you want to, which can be nice on occasion. Block then is more forceful, hiding them fully. I'm not into political content and certain subjects so I have a long list of muted words tailoring what I see to my liking. This feature is a godsend, and is implemented well on X. Self-censorship works better for me.
To single out YouTube, for example, you can block channels over there, but there is no way to block them showing up in search results, which I find creepy. I have for years been ignored asking YouTube to implement this. There's also no mute or selective-mute feature.
X allows posting of links, so I'm not sure what you mean by mentioning that.
BlueSky now is no indication of where it will be in six months regarding features or everything else. It's not where the vast majority of people are who like the style of social media app that is a mostly short messaging platform, and no one I follow has left X.
No website will ever be perfect, and the best social interactions are really had in person. For social media for me, X is easily my favourite platform for mostly text based interactions and has a good balance of video and image features now. YouTube, to nod to the them again uses AI to aggressively censor comments below videos even for non-controversial topics. After you comment you can open the page in a private window to check if your comment made it through and you'd be surprised the level of censorship the platform has—to the point where I typically no longer bother to leave comments on YouTube.
When it comes to offensive content, I have no issue with X, as I'm not easily offended, and can mute whatever accounts and words I want. If someone should be easily offended my advice would be to not use X. Problem solved.
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On algorithmic feeds, there is a large visibility penalty for posts with links to content on other websites.
Yeah, I wish youtube had better blocking features.
Yeah, youtube is just a horrible place for conversations in comments.
If nothing else, it just gets tiring having to scroll past a bunch of posts that are intended to offend in order to get to any insightful comments. Then there is a bunch of crypto and ai crap.
The owner of X gave a ton of money to the campaign of the next US administration, is going to be part of that administration, has received billions from contracts with the US government, and touts X as a news app (which focuses a lot on the administration of the US government). People who pay this man get favored in the algorithms. Posters of more engaging content are rewarded, even though engagement is often inversely proportional to truthfulness and civility.
I just see massive conflicts of interest and bad incentives.
Much of social media is an attention grab. The more attention a user gets the more money they make, should that be their goal—not mine. Social media has its uses and certainly its limits: benefits and negatives. Users can curate and mute and interact with the type of content they want.
In the case of X, users can exclusively stay on the Following tab, should they wish to only see content they are interested in.
Try visiting YouTube not logged in, it's like landing in hell. I found IG more mentally draining than X tbh. YouTube I use mostly for long form content from accounts I subscribe to. X I use for updates, and cute and funny videos and posts, and to a certain extent content that is censored from YouTube. More recently X has noticeably began to push opposing viewpoints in the For You tab. The opposite to what you usually consume. For the For You tab it would be nice to have a drop down to choose from many different viewpoints and moods.