Twitter grew an incredible '1.6%' since Musk's $44B takeover. Amazing. Wow

Growth of X's userbase has reportedly flatlined since Elon Musk took over the thing formerly known as Twitter. The social media zoo grew its daily active userbase by 1.6 percent in the 12 months since the second quarter of last year, according to internal figures obtained by the Financial Times. X now averages 251 million …

[Dickie_Mosfet]

Bots

> We're told the app-site saw its userbase expand by around 15 percent in every single year from 2019 to 2022...

I thought that Musk discovered a huge number of bot accounts when he took over, and liquidated them. Perhaps this explains the lack of 'expansion'?

[doublelayer]

Re: Bots

He complained about bots before he bought the thing. Whether those bots actually existed or were his attempt to avoid buying something that wasn't a good idea to buy and he knew it by that point is harder to prove. It's also not clear whether changes he made had any effect on the number of bot accounts. In general, if they had as good a defense as you're suggesting they do, they would have included that defense and some attempt to back it up.

[Robert 22]

Re: Bots

I have a hard time believing that there are not more bots than ever.

I regularly see flat out conspiracy theroiy stuff (e.g., Covid vaccines killed 1/5 of New Zealand's population) with huge numbers of "likes."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bots

I delete, on average, about 60 follower bots per week. They're all of a similar profile, usually a woman, zero posts often with a string of numbers after a garbled name or they'll have one post which reads like a excerpt from a brussels sprout spotters field manual. If they're feeling particularly inventive they'll advertise their pr0n in their bio.

The whole place is saturated with bots.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Bots

"It's also not clear whether changes he made had any effect on the number of bot accounts."

Not all "bot" accounts are a negative. A bot that goes out and fetches xits fitting certain criteria isn't a bad thing. Baby/bath water. I'm sure that xItter themselves uses bots for things. Back in the bronze age when I had a Twitter account, there was a "bot" that would let me know when ISS would be overhead. That got too popular and Twitter swatted the account. It was really one of the few things that I liked about the service and I found useful. It's fun to get a response from Eric Idle and Steve Martin, but so many people I knew (and knew me) I had to stop following as they had far too much time on their hands to be allowed an account. Many words typed, so little information.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Bots

Probably. Musk deleted 43M bots, and 43M real people must have joined.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bots

"deleted" "real"

It's basically accounting. Convert a bot account into a "real" account to keep the investors happy, regardless of the fact that it's still a bot account really.

[Andrew Hodgkinson]

Re: Bots

If he did, then the number of bots I'm being DM'd by - mostly with random character names, so not even "bot001", more like "hV6YealzmEJg2U8S" - must be a coincidence. My follower base is small and changes very little, yet I now get at least one spam message a day from bots. Used to be maybe one a month or so. It's escalating.

Yes, of course, this is an anecdote providing only a single data point. Even so, I'd be more surprised to find that the growth, such as it is, is in fact real humans - rather than a decrease in human users and a continued rise in robots.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

Re: Bots

I think he took over all the bot accounts and made them follow him to boost his ego.

It's the most likely explanation as bots and fake accounts have surged on the site as millions of 'real' users have left.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Growth of X's userbase has reportedly flatlined"

I'm sure generative AI will help restore growth.

[bud-weis-er]

And the Tesla shareholders will pay for any money he loses :)

[BartyFartsLast]

hush

It's only coincidence that his Tesla payday is so similar to the amount he paid for twitter

[bud-weis-er]

Re: hush

This is sarcasm right?

[The Dogs Meevonks]

Re: hush

how would You know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter

Loving El Reg’s editorial decision to call it Twitter in the byline. I was hoping we could just decide to ignore the new name.There’s no law requiring us to go along with this deluded nonsense. Worst rename ever.

[I am the liquor]

Re: Twitter

Perhaps we could compromise and call it Xitter. I think the X would be pronounced the same as in "Xi Jinping".

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Twitter

It does get called that in the article. El Reg seem to have taken up that mantle already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Twitter

If Elmo can dead-name people, we can dead-name his assets.

[CowHorseFrog]

How do we know the numbers are actually true ?

[Charlie Clark]

We never did.

[bigtreeman]

Worth so much more than money

X is a public megaphone for use by himself and extreme right wing nut jobs.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Worth so much more than money

There's a good number of idiots out there who believe twitter is a better place for his brand of free speech, y'know, the one where people who disagree with or criticise him are free to have their accounts cancelled.

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: Worth so much more than money

Yeah, if it wasn't a nazi bar before, it certainly is now.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: Worth so much more than money

Ooh, two nazi downvotes! I welcome your boos, I've seen what makes you cheer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cynical? Moi?

How many twitter bots can 12,000 GPUs run?

[PM.]

At least it didn't shrink ...

.. with so many claiming to be leaving it.

[David Hicklin]

Re: At least it didn't shrink ...

Oh they probably left but leaving a dormant account behind so that someone else could not grab it (if that is allowed for deleted account names - never used the platform)

[DS999]

It is probably really a decrease

One of Musk's changes made it so that if you follow a Twitter link without being logged in all you can see is the original post. You can't see any followups (the 2/5, 3/5 etc. for multipart posts) or other replies.

I know that because though I have a Twitter account from back when it was brand new I basically never logged in before and wasn't about to start just because Musk made it more inhospitable to anonymous access via the internet. But I suspect a lot of people like me caved and started logging in so they could see full threads instead of just the linked post - surely enough to account for the 1.6% growth. If it hadn't been for that change it would have been a decline of some amount, but exactly what amount is anyone's guess.

That trick only works once though, so next year expect a decline in users. Because he can't block Twitter for anonymous access entirely - if he did people would stop linking to Twitter online because there would be too many annoyed people (like me) who refuse to login just to view a link and would let the person doing that linking know, loudly.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: It is probably really a decrease

I just stopped visiting once he made it necessary to log in for any sort of useful access. Same as Facesbook links, why bother?

[tip pc]

Re: It is probably really a decrease

That’s why I avoid facebook, I hate having to “reveal” myself to see some stupid post I’ve been sent.

Smart move by Musk, makes the talking heads think subscribers are up but is actually just including people that use the service anyway.

Anonymous likes is also good.

Many other bad things but still more user friendly than Facebook.

How’s that mastodon going for lefties?

Surely no need to use right wing twitter if there is a good alternative.

[jospanner]

Re: It is probably really a decrease

Bluesky and Masto are great, I can post there without some loser called ElonLuvr1488 sending me death threats.

[John Robson]

Re: It is probably really a decrease

Unless a tweet has been screenshotted into an article I don't see it.

If it was important then the journalist would have put the text in the article, else it was just a waste of time anyway.

[Roopee]

Re: It is probably really a decrease

If it were important the journalist wouldn't be quoting Twitter as their source in the first place...

[Howard Sway]

Four million Musk fans can't be wrong

Although that won't be the new user increase, as there's no way of telling how many have left, it's still a pretty pathetic increase for a man who's come to believe that the whole world is desperate to hear every half baked opinion that forms in his skull. And I doubt there's going to be any growth at all there in the next year. Of course, with Twitter having being taken private, there's unfortunately no way of knowing how much money it's lost each year, although the amount Tesla shareholder mugs are being asked to stump up in "genius bonus" may be a clue to how much it's costing to keep it afloat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead Parrot

"This is an X Twitter."

[John Robson]

Re: Dead Parrot

No it's not, it's pining for the fjollowers

[Irongut]

> He promised to do something about spam bots on the app-site, though we'll let you decide how well that went, and how well it's faring now with automated accounts.

Could you maybe act like a journalist and tell me? I have no idea what bots were like on Twitter, having never had an account, and have less idea how Xitter is doing with bots and automated accounts because why would I create an account at the Nazi bar?

For all I know Xitler personally replaced all the code with RPC calls written in Perl and that solved the spam bot problem.

[doublelayer]

I'm not sure there's an objective way to answer that question. I don't have an account either, so all I have is subjective reports from some people. Those reports universally say that there was a large increase in spam and bot activity, in some cases causing the users to leave. However, we must assume that any of my friends who had Twitter accounts, did not see a spam flood, and are thus just fine with their accounts probably didn't feel the need to tell me this, so that would bias the results in favor of more spam. A reporter could collect a lot more anecdotal reports, but might not be able to give an answer that works for everyone. What we can say from the data we have so far is that some subset of people have seen a worsening of spam, so there has not been universal improvement and may have been no improvement at all.

[TeeCee]

"Xitter"

I guess that's pronounced "shitter"?

If so, have a bun.

[gauge symmetry]

Amazing. Wow.

Elon Musk fired 3/4 of Twitter's employees and the website and application continue to operate normally. Amazing. The petty snarkiness of this article's author indicates he may have been one of those employees. Wow.

[doublelayer]

Re: Amazing. Wow.

You need to learn a few things, such as what coding workers do and what non-coding workers do. If I leave my employer and my code falls over when I'm not there to babysit it, my code was bad. If my code was even mediocre, it should keep working the same way it did before, meaning that if input doesn't go outside specified bounds, it should keep producing valid output. Code continuing to run after employees leave is no proof that the programmers were not needed, because what does suffer when you fire them is the ability to quickly make changes to that code. If it had fallen over, it would have indicated one of two things: the programmers were very bad or the system managing them and their output was very bad to the extent that they couldn't produce good code under it.

You should also learn that companies whose main product isn't tech don't just have programmers. You could fire lots of people and still have the programming teams intact. You'd have lost the people who gain advertisers' money, the people who prevent the kind of stuff appearing which drives off the advertisers, the people who make sure that it is properly working in different countries with different laws and languages, the people who make sure that bills are being paid (both your bills to others and others bills to you), but your programmers would still be there and your platform shouldn't fall over. That is not the recipe for a functioning business that gets all its money from advertising.

If you think your system would fall over if you fired more people, so therefore you have the right number of people, you're doing at least two things wrong.

[Casca]

Re: Amazing. Wow.

Working normally? Yea sure. Thats why two factors suddenly stopped working in some countries and so forth

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Amazing. Wow.

TO be fair, twitter is a very basic app. It doesnt actually do that much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man buys media sewer

Makes worse media sewer.

Now for the weather…

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonprofit “Media Matters”

> Media Matters for investigating ads being placed next to hate speech on the platform.

Media Matters (Key financial supporter George Soros) manipulated the feed to create these ad placements, if not actually creating the hate speech content. Get with the program Elon and all your legal, financial and public snarking shall evaporate.

[jospanner]

Re: Nonprofit “Media Matters”

How strange, my dogs are acting up.

Now they're trying to do a hitler salute.

[MachDiamond]

Growth?

The article is talking about more inventory (users), not customer base (advertisers).

[jospanner]

As a person of increasing age and falling understanding of modern politics, I find it illuminating that one of the only words you're not allowed to say on the Free Speech Site is the technical term for non-trans people (the antonym of transgender, I believe).

But telling trans people to kill themselves is, apparently, fine; the reply section to a friend's trans daughter was just a pile of vitriol and hate crowned by blue checkmarks.

This all tells me a lot about how Elon's mind works.

[Mitoo Bobsworth]

Genius???

Buy Twitter for eye-watering amount of money

Throw out most of the employees

Don't pay bills

Reinstate some of the worst people previously banned from the platform

Tell advertisers to 'proceed with self fornication"

Sue advertisers when they comply.

Still trying to figure out what kind of result he's after.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Genius???

"Still trying to figure out what kind of result he's after."

The 'result' would be what you formulate your 'plan' to achieve, but there doesn't seem to be any indication they've worked out that whole 'result' thing yet. This is the stage where Elon pokes things with a stick to see what happens.