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What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to. Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

rascul 22d ago
There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.
Leynos 22d ago
It's mostly a porn site these days
- loeg 22d ago
  This is one of those situations where describing your algorithmic feed tells us more about you than about Twitter.
  - Markoff 22d ago
    that's my experience with using anonymous search on Nitter instance as well, so hardly anything about me using it without any account
    - pessimizer 22d ago
      But that's got to be what you're searching for. I forget that there's any porn on X, and for a fairly long period I actually thought they had banned it.
      - Markoff 22d ago
        yeah right, if I search for "Prague" I am certainly looking for porn/dick pics, same with pretty much any city you search for this just says you never use search feature
    - dkenyser 22d ago
      Yeah, this is such a tired lazy response by people and is definitely not true anymore. Spin up a new account on a fresh device on a network I've never been on. Click a random video and scroll. Usually the first 3 or 4 scrolls is porn or someone being killed. Anyone saying there isn't an insane amount of porn and worse on twitter is either lying or hasn't been on the site since it turned into the cesspool we have today.
    - numpad0 22d ago
      I think it must be that porn often ends up being the most likely relevant content in the randomized initial state for a lot of algorithms. It then shifts and focuses into your actual liking as it collects more data. That should explain a lot of these phenomenons.
  - dan-robertson 22d ago
    I think it was historically something like 30% of Twitter traffic. I don’t think this is a new trend in terms of total volume but maybe the filtering got a lot worse.
  - lynndotpy 22d ago
    I think we should leave this kind of argument for schoolchildren denigrating one another and for the deranged people who will dole out verbal abuse to defend their favorite platforms and/or CEOs. This is not one of "those situations".
cdrnsf 22d ago
[flagged]
- abawany 22d ago
  I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
  - cdrnsf 22d ago
    I'd love to see public agencies or anyone making any sort of significant public announcements use any other platform. FTP a text file to a server for all I care, but I'm not risking a search of a platform that openly encourages extremism and discourages moderation.
    - brunoarueira 22d ago
      I think Mastodon or something similar would be really good, without a central moderation.
      - kalleboo 22d ago
        They could literally just post to a WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin, and then people can either just read it on the website, or follow it from a fediverse/mastodon account.
  - dylan604 22d ago
    Where else do you suggest they post? Publishing to the socials casts the widest net form them. If they operate their own website and post there, a number approaching zero would see the posts. Do you expect a new app per municipality to be a solution? Or one app to become a new platform just to interact with gov't agencies that the other platforms already provide? You have the question, but have you spent any time coming up with answers/suggestions?
q8zd3 23d ago
It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income
- rogerrogerr 22d ago
  Can you expand on this? I'm not tracking.
  - nemomarx 22d ago
    They have those payouts for check marks? A lot of people post click bait for views to bring in small amounts of money, usually from a poorer country I think
  - q8zd3 22d ago
    Verified profiles get money based on engagement rate of their posts, only from other verified profiles; I don't think I need to tell you the quality of said posts, AI slop included. They are literally getting money (not making) without producing anything and that aligns with Elon's world view of a jobless civilization driven by AI and robots.
    - rogerrogerr 20d ago
      Are they not producing anything? I agree that I place no value on slop, but my grandparents sure do. Maybe what they're producing is net negative value at the societal level, but (unfortunately?) they're not producing nothing.
giancarlostoro 22d ago
There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site. Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out. What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically. Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add): Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
- utopiah 22d ago
  [flagged]
  - tolerance 22d ago
    I would love to see a visual representation of what you think those sort of people look like.
    - davidw 22d ago
      Probably pretty ... banal, like Hannah Arendt pointed out.
    - utopiah 22d ago
      Fiction would led us to believe they look ugly or gorgeous... history has shown us they look very banal.
      - tolerance 22d ago
        Right. All that's left is for us to figure out how to specify the type of banality you and I and our sibling commenter are imagining.
gdulli 22d ago
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
- dredmorbius 22d ago
  Unless they're shut down. G+ comes to mind. (Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)
tokioyoyo 22d ago
Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan. NA tuned account has more of what you said.
- rootsudo 22d ago
  The algos aren’t language neutral yet. Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
  - tokioyoyo 22d ago
    After some time, and muting/skipping through the usual japanese race-content, it’s more bearable. Fastest way for me to find the reason why a train line is down and etc. Like last week my feed was all about Chiba flooding. Very relevant.
anonzzzies 22d ago
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
- angoragoats 22d ago
  I have not used Twitter since 2022 (nuked my account) and I have not missed it even once. You should give it a try.
naasking 22d ago
Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.
- bee_rider 22d ago
  IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
  - naasking 22d ago
    You can read posts you link to directly, but no comments. That's what makes it less useful.
    - iamnothere 22d ago
      They changed this slightly, and 1-3 “top” comments are now sometimes visible, but you can’t dig into the thread. And if you click anything you get popups asking you to log in.
  - delecti 22d ago
    What's difficult is reading threads, or more broadly replies. But single posts? Absolutely fine, in fact it's about the only thing that is totally functional without being logged in.
    - bee_rider 22d ago
      Oh, weird. I didn’t think there was a way to get rid of the pop-over that hides the post on iOS Safari. But it turns out that there’s a button to close it, just, completely disconnected from the pop-over and hanging out with a bunch of unrelated UI.
    - lynndotpy 22d ago
      As others have said, this is broken in some contexts too. I also get blocked by a popup on mobile. I only get "See this post in the app" with "Use the app to view all comments and discover more posts." with only an "Open X" button in that dialogue. There is no button to disable this. I can only see the text by using "Page Zoom" buttons on my phone, so it's really not worth it.
23asfdnb 22d ago
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets. It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it. I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages. Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
TitaRusell 22d ago
Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.
- GJim 22d ago
  > Breaking news. Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news). No thanks.
- shermantanktop 22d ago
  Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful. Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
  - vatsachak 22d ago
    Yeah browsing every stressful piece of news on X was unironically increasing my cortisol levels
  - stephen_g 22d ago
    Yeah, I used to watch things like this, I stopped using Twitter the second it became called 'X' and actually find I don't miss it including the major event live-tweeting. Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.
  - shermantanktop 21d ago
    Literally the next thing that happened after I posted this yesterday: my kid texted me that Dolly Parton had died. That’s how some news gets to me—- it’s important to someone I know. It turns out that that is both a good filter and fast enough propagation.
- asdff 22d ago
  I mean, if it is real it's on every wire service there is too, with slightly less hysteria.
vaylian 22d ago
There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.
- cmrdporcupine 22d ago
  fwiw a lot of the key accounts for this now also post to both Bluesky and Mastodon
  - senderista 22d ago
    I don't follow the war anymore but I used to follow twitter OSINT accounts supporting both sides; I find it hard to imagine pro-Russian accounts posting on bsky or fedi?
    - KingMob 22d ago
      Dunno about fediverse, but there's definitely a bunch on bsky. Or there were, at least; I've blocked a bunch, and my feeds don't show me more, so maybe they're gone.
      - senderista 22d ago
        Huh, I'm not on bsky so I wouldn't know. To be clear, I was not talking about troll accounts, but about OSINT accounts that generally try to present accurate info and happen to be pro-Russian. E.g. when I was following this stuff there was a medical student in the Dominican Republic who was running such an account. And of course there are many pro-Russian Telegram channels who are highly critical of the government and military (often for being insufficiently hawkish).
- dopa42365 22d ago
  Those are all telegram reposts, barely anyone in the former combloc uses twitter.
shevy-java 22d ago
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
- slater 22d ago
  Are you gonna tell us how Twitter started censoring you, or is this a "which opinions, mf-er" goose meme situation?
  - kotaKat 22d ago
    You know what, I'll throw my hat into the ring on Shitter censorship: Once enough 'big' accounts block you for any arbitrary reason they like, your account is heavily downweighted enough to send your replies, posts, and everything into yet another class of shadowban that isn't a shadowban. I've never interacted with the ilks of people like a16z and yet their Twitter block definitely causes a heavier algo downrank impact just 'being' there.
- veeti 22d ago
  Terminally online, infighting and purity testing leftist weirdos who never have and never will achieve anything politically continue to push "nazi bar" rhetoric, but actual people just don't give a shit. Here's some far right nazis for your reference: https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU https://x.com/AmnestyEU
dwedge 22d ago
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms. So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
- jerlam 22d ago
  It's not just Mac apps. A Twitter ad is a negative indicator, and makes me less interested in the product.
- zahlman 22d ago
  > the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust. For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.) If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
  - dwedge 22d ago
    > If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour. I reported them all the Cloudflare and Cloudflare took them down. One moved away from Cloudflare, and Twitter kept them up. I reported another to NiceNIC and they asked for: 1. Verifiable malicious download file or sample hash 2. Screenshot or screen recording with the full URL visible 3. Evidence of malicious scripts, obfuscated code, or download chain 4. HTTP response, redirect chain, headers, or packet capture data 5. Third-party security verdict tied to the specific URL or file I just ignored them. I don't work for them and if they want to host illegal content then it's not my business decision. This one in particular had the download in base64, piping into Javascript and running a binary as a fake Apple Updater script. But I am sick of this attitude that it's my responsibility for a malware report to be taken seriously. If they introduce malware bounties then ok, but otherwise I'm doing them a favour by reporting it and if they want to continue to host it after reasonable being made aware of its existence, they should be legally responsible.
janejeon 22d ago
I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas: 1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
bluecalm 22d ago
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok. >>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it. Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
fg137 22d ago
From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.
- miladyincontrol 22d ago
  Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another. Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
- shaky-carrousel 22d ago
  [flagged]
  - notthemessiah 22d ago
    English is still the lingua franca of Europe. I find that users in all parts of Asia still use Xitter heavily (though some artists in East and Southeast Asia fled when the Grok edit button was added), and only nazis and campist communists still use Xitter in the US.
  - cbeach 22d ago
    [flagged]
    - timmytokyo 22d ago
      https://bsky.app/profile/artcandee.bsky.social/post/3lgdvykc5yc27 https://bsky.app/profile/artcandee.bsky.social/post/3lgdvykc...
      - cbeach 22d ago
        That Bluesky link is sign-in-walled. Ironic, given how many people criticise X.com for its sign-in requirements.
archagon 22d ago
[flagged]
- pessimizer 22d ago
  Musk is who you engage with on twitter. You're one of the people who makes his account the most engaged with. I follow tons of stuff on twitter, and have no idea what Musk is doing unless it gets in the mainstream news.
  - archagon 22d ago
    I'm not on Twitter at all because it doesn't feel good to use a social media platform owned by an ardent white supremacist directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in the third world. Blood money, blood attention.
    - pessimizer 22d ago
      [dead]
    - iamnothere 22d ago
      Sibling comment (now dead) is correct. “No ethical consumption under capitalism,” amiright? Polemic aside, there’s a better anti-imperialist/global South cadre on X than on any other platform, including the Fediverse. (If you actually care about following the struggles of people on the ground, rather than virtue signaling.) That will be a bit harder to read now though... I am sure an international nitter mirror will pop up eventually.
  - kijashdkujdfhas 22d ago
    [flagged]
    - angoragoats 22d ago
      This. Stop going to the Nazi bar, or else you too are effectively a Nazi.
lazzlazzlazz 22d ago
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
- Melatonic 22d ago
  Examples ?
kyle-rb 22d ago
I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more. On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply. I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
- sillysaurusx 22d ago
  That sounds infuriating. I hope you can recover your account.
  - kyle-rb 22d ago
    My initial suspicion was that my account was flagged because I only used the web version (the PWA experience on mobile is pretty good) so I've been using the Android app the last few days, and I'll see if that has any signal on my account. In another view days I'll try filing a support ticket, maybe claiming something like "I was mass-reported by DSA leftists for my right-wing views"; things along those lines have gotten some peoples' permanent suspensions lifted.
- pessimizer 22d ago
  > as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
- antonvs 22d ago
Brendinooo 22d ago
>What is the main use case for X these days? I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.) I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because... It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site). And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all! >Is it still as popular as it used to be? A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
- kemayo 22d ago
  > It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts. X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
  - Brendinooo 22d ago
    >amongst the microposting sites I look at "major" was doing a bit of work for me. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that. >would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back This hasn't happened to me in awhile. Dunno if it was a transient thing, an app thing, or something that has been reversed.
    - 22d ago
Marha01 22d ago
> What is the main use case for X these days? There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
frereubu 22d ago
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
- defrost 22d ago
  A problem for the UK here is things like Rupert Lowe set to be paid as much for divisive posts on X as for being MP - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/24/rupert-lowe-restore-britain-earn-same-on-x-as-being-mp-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/24/rupert-lowe...
- dom96 22d ago
  They could at least use both. I'm pretty annoyed with Andy Burnham. He's had a Bluesky account that has been pretty active... right up until he became a PM. Would it kill him to get a member of his team to repost his tweets to Bluesky?
- deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
spike021 22d ago
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
loeg 22d ago
> What is the main use case for X these days? The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.
runjake 22d ago
It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise. If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.
- pyinstallwoes 22d ago
  What public stats say otherwise?
  - runjake 21d ago
    Similarweb shows a consistent ~15% YoY decline. It also shows growth beginning in early Summer, so this trend may be changing as of very recently. Sensor Tower shows a consistent ~10% YoY decline. DataReportal/Kepios shows a ~5.3% decline in ad reach. EU DSA Transparency repoorts shows ~10% decline Pew Research shows a >20% decline in the US. Regardless, I still use X and find a lot of value from the people I follow. I'm paradoxically optimist.
KronisLV 22d ago
> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.
csomar 22d ago
I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine. I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
yubblegum 22d ago
> What is the main use case for X these days? twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International. a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.
- SwellJoe 22d ago
  I don't believe the extremism engine of Xitter is reducing the risk of global catastrophe. I think it's accelerating that risk. Certainly it helped elect Trump, and no one can argue that's been good for advancing the cause of peace on earth or avoiding several other causes of mass death.
bonoboTP 22d ago
AI research, computer vision/machine learning academic projects and papers, conferences.
xtracto 22d ago
It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ... As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
- autoexec 22d ago
  There should be laws that require all government statements to be published on an official government site and be forever archived there no matter where or however else they were published. That way politicians can take advantage of the reach of social media sites while not requiring anyone to use them and also providing a means for those statements to be verified and preserved.
  - conception 22d ago
    There are in the US. Just the current administration doesn’t follow them.
- scientifik 22d ago
  This right here is the thing that shows how much influence big tech has. Everyone has their anecdotal story about porn, spam, malware or whatever flooding Twitter meanwhile your local city government treats it as an official communications channel.
burningChrome 22d ago
>> What is the main use case for X these days? More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still. >> Is it still as popular as it used to be? Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that. >> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it. X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol
Melatonic 22d ago
Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those. Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
Lammy 22d ago
My feed is mostly people petting rabbits
angoragoats 22d ago
I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.
CamperBob2 22d ago
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example. And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it. Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.
- lemaomao 22d ago
  > non-evil people > ML developers and researchers Brother in Christ, pick one.
  - lynndotpy 22d ago
    I'm an ML developer and researcher and I left X. A lot of us did and do believe neural networks can provide utility for humanity. There's just a lot of money in drinking the AGI LLM VC WN koolaid. Not everyone has drank that koolaid.
CM30 22d ago
Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter. There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
j-bos 22d ago
If you want alpha on things x is the place to be, aside from some discord servers. I've recently leaned off hn and onto twitter.
Gigachad 22d ago
It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.
lynndotpy 22d ago
For one of the big use cases, you can look at the NCMEC's reports-by-ESP numbers. For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.

rascul 22d ago

There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.

Leynos 22d ago

It's mostly a porn site these days

loeg 22d ago
This is one of those situations where describing your algorithmic feed tells us more about you than about Twitter.
- Markoff 22d ago
  that's my experience with using anonymous search on Nitter instance as well, so hardly anything about me using it without any account
  - pessimizer 22d ago
    But that's got to be what you're searching for. I forget that there's any porn on X, and for a fairly long period I actually thought they had banned it.
    - Markoff 22d ago
      yeah right, if I search for "Prague" I am certainly looking for porn/dick pics, same with pretty much any city you search for this just says you never use search feature
  - dkenyser 22d ago
    Yeah, this is such a tired lazy response by people and is definitely not true anymore. Spin up a new account on a fresh device on a network I've never been on. Click a random video and scroll. Usually the first 3 or 4 scrolls is porn or someone being killed. Anyone saying there isn't an insane amount of porn and worse on twitter is either lying or hasn't been on the site since it turned into the cesspool we have today.
  - numpad0 22d ago
    I think it must be that porn often ends up being the most likely relevant content in the randomized initial state for a lot of algorithms. It then shifts and focuses into your actual liking as it collects more data. That should explain a lot of these phenomenons.
- dan-robertson 22d ago
  I think it was historically something like 30% of Twitter traffic. I don’t think this is a new trend in terms of total volume but maybe the filtering got a lot worse.
- lynndotpy 22d ago
  I think we should leave this kind of argument for schoolchildren denigrating one another and for the deranged people who will dole out verbal abuse to defend their favorite platforms and/or CEOs. This is not one of "those situations".

cdrnsf 22d ago

[flagged]

abawany 22d ago
I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
- cdrnsf 22d ago
  I'd love to see public agencies or anyone making any sort of significant public announcements use any other platform. FTP a text file to a server for all I care, but I'm not risking a search of a platform that openly encourages extremism and discourages moderation.
  - brunoarueira 22d ago
    I think Mastodon or something similar would be really good, without a central moderation.
    - kalleboo 22d ago
      They could literally just post to a WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin, and then people can either just read it on the website, or follow it from a fediverse/mastodon account.
- dylan604 22d ago
  Where else do you suggest they post? Publishing to the socials casts the widest net form them. If they operate their own website and post there, a number approaching zero would see the posts. Do you expect a new app per municipality to be a solution? Or one app to become a new platform just to interact with gov't agencies that the other platforms already provide? You have the question, but have you spent any time coming up with answers/suggestions?

q8zd3 23d ago

It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income

rogerrogerr 22d ago
Can you expand on this? I'm not tracking.
- nemomarx 22d ago
  They have those payouts for check marks? A lot of people post click bait for views to bring in small amounts of money, usually from a poorer country I think
- q8zd3 22d ago
  Verified profiles get money based on engagement rate of their posts, only from other verified profiles; I don't think I need to tell you the quality of said posts, AI slop included. They are literally getting money (not making) without producing anything and that aligns with Elon's world view of a jobless civilization driven by AI and robots.
  - rogerrogerr 20d ago
    Are they not producing anything? I agree that I place no value on slop, but my grandparents sure do. Maybe what they're producing is net negative value at the societal level, but (unfortunately?) they're not producing nothing.

giancarlostoro 22d ago

There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site. Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out. What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically. Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add): Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.

utopiah 22d ago
[flagged]
- tolerance 22d ago
  I would love to see a visual representation of what you think those sort of people look like.
  - davidw 22d ago
    Probably pretty ... banal, like Hannah Arendt pointed out.
  - utopiah 22d ago
    Fiction would led us to believe they look ugly or gorgeous... history has shown us they look very banal.
    - tolerance 22d ago
      Right. All that's left is for us to figure out how to specify the type of banality you and I and our sibling commenter are imagining.

gdulli 22d ago

The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.

dredmorbius 22d ago
Unless they're shut down. G+ comes to mind. (Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)

tokioyoyo 22d ago

Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan. NA tuned account has more of what you said.

rootsudo 22d ago
The algos aren’t language neutral yet. Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
- tokioyoyo 22d ago
  After some time, and muting/skipping through the usual japanese race-content, it’s more bearable. Fastest way for me to find the reason why a train line is down and etc. Like last week my feed was all about Chiba flooding. Very relevant.

anonzzzies 22d ago

Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.

angoragoats 22d ago
I have not used Twitter since 2022 (nuked my account) and I have not missed it even once. You should give it a try.

naasking 22d ago

Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.

bee_rider 22d ago
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
- naasking 22d ago
  You can read posts you link to directly, but no comments. That's what makes it less useful.
  - iamnothere 22d ago
    They changed this slightly, and 1-3 “top” comments are now sometimes visible, but you can’t dig into the thread. And if you click anything you get popups asking you to log in.
- delecti 22d ago
  What's difficult is reading threads, or more broadly replies. But single posts? Absolutely fine, in fact it's about the only thing that is totally functional without being logged in.
  - bee_rider 22d ago
    Oh, weird. I didn’t think there was a way to get rid of the pop-over that hides the post on iOS Safari. But it turns out that there’s a button to close it, just, completely disconnected from the pop-over and hanging out with a bunch of unrelated UI.
  - lynndotpy 22d ago
    As others have said, this is broken in some contexts too. I also get blocked by a popup on mobile. I only get "See this post in the app" with "Use the app to view all comments and discover more posts." with only an "Open X" button in that dialogue. There is no button to disable this. I can only see the text by using "Page Zoom" buttons on my phone, so it's really not worth it.

23asfdnb 22d ago

All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets. It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it. I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages. Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.

TitaRusell 22d ago

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

GJim 22d ago
> Breaking news. Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news). No thanks.
shermantanktop 22d ago
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful. Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
- vatsachak 22d ago
  Yeah browsing every stressful piece of news on X was unironically increasing my cortisol levels
- stephen_g 22d ago
  Yeah, I used to watch things like this, I stopped using Twitter the second it became called 'X' and actually find I don't miss it including the major event live-tweeting. Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.
- shermantanktop 21d ago
  Literally the next thing that happened after I posted this yesterday: my kid texted me that Dolly Parton had died. That’s how some news gets to me—- it’s important to someone I know. It turns out that that is both a good filter and fast enough propagation.
asdff 22d ago
I mean, if it is real it's on every wire service there is too, with slightly less hysteria.

vaylian 22d ago

There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.

cmrdporcupine 22d ago
fwiw a lot of the key accounts for this now also post to both Bluesky and Mastodon
- senderista 22d ago
  I don't follow the war anymore but I used to follow twitter OSINT accounts supporting both sides; I find it hard to imagine pro-Russian accounts posting on bsky or fedi?
  - KingMob 22d ago
    Dunno about fediverse, but there's definitely a bunch on bsky. Or there were, at least; I've blocked a bunch, and my feeds don't show me more, so maybe they're gone.
    - senderista 22d ago
      Huh, I'm not on bsky so I wouldn't know. To be clear, I was not talking about troll accounts, but about OSINT accounts that generally try to present accurate info and happen to be pro-Russian. E.g. when I was following this stuff there was a medical student in the Dominican Republic who was running such an account. And of course there are many pro-Russian Telegram channels who are highly critical of the government and military (often for being insufficiently hawkish).
dopa42365 22d ago
Those are all telegram reposts, barely anyone in the former combloc uses twitter.

shevy-java 22d ago

Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.

slater 22d ago
Are you gonna tell us how Twitter started censoring you, or is this a "which opinions, mf-er" goose meme situation?
- kotaKat 22d ago
  You know what, I'll throw my hat into the ring on Shitter censorship: Once enough 'big' accounts block you for any arbitrary reason they like, your account is heavily downweighted enough to send your replies, posts, and everything into yet another class of shadowban that isn't a shadowban. I've never interacted with the ilks of people like a16z and yet their Twitter block definitely causes a heavier algo downrank impact just 'being' there.
veeti 22d ago
Terminally online, infighting and purity testing leftist weirdos who never have and never will achieve anything politically continue to push "nazi bar" rhetoric, but actual people just don't give a shit. Here's some far right nazis for your reference: https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU https://x.com/AmnestyEU

dwedge 22d ago

This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms. So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.

jerlam 22d ago
It's not just Mac apps. A Twitter ad is a negative indicator, and makes me less interested in the product.
zahlman 22d ago
> the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust. For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.) If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
- dwedge 22d ago
  > If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour. I reported them all the Cloudflare and Cloudflare took them down. One moved away from Cloudflare, and Twitter kept them up. I reported another to NiceNIC and they asked for: 1. Verifiable malicious download file or sample hash 2. Screenshot or screen recording with the full URL visible 3. Evidence of malicious scripts, obfuscated code, or download chain 4. HTTP response, redirect chain, headers, or packet capture data 5. Third-party security verdict tied to the specific URL or file I just ignored them. I don't work for them and if they want to host illegal content then it's not my business decision. This one in particular had the download in base64, piping into Javascript and running a binary as a fake Apple Updater script. But I am sick of this attitude that it's my responsibility for a malware report to be taken seriously. If they introduce malware bounties then ok, but otherwise I'm doing them a favour by reporting it and if they want to continue to host it after reasonable being made aware of its existence, they should be legally responsible.

janejeon 22d ago

I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas: 1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)

bluecalm 22d ago

A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok. >>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it. Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.

fg137 22d ago

From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.

miladyincontrol 22d ago
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another. Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
shaky-carrousel 22d ago
[flagged]
- notthemessiah 22d ago
  English is still the lingua franca of Europe. I find that users in all parts of Asia still use Xitter heavily (though some artists in East and Southeast Asia fled when the Grok edit button was added), and only nazis and campist communists still use Xitter in the US.
- cbeach 22d ago
  [flagged]
  - timmytokyo 22d ago
    https://bsky.app/profile/artcandee.bsky.social/post/3lgdvykc5yc27 https://bsky.app/profile/artcandee.bsky.social/post/3lgdvykc...
    - cbeach 22d ago
      That Bluesky link is sign-in-walled. Ironic, given how many people criticise X.com for its sign-in requirements.

archagon 22d ago

[flagged]

pessimizer 22d ago
Musk is who you engage with on twitter. You're one of the people who makes his account the most engaged with. I follow tons of stuff on twitter, and have no idea what Musk is doing unless it gets in the mainstream news.
- archagon 22d ago
  I'm not on Twitter at all because it doesn't feel good to use a social media platform owned by an ardent white supremacist directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in the third world. Blood money, blood attention.
  - pessimizer 22d ago
    [dead]
  - iamnothere 22d ago
    Sibling comment (now dead) is correct. “No ethical consumption under capitalism,” amiright? Polemic aside, there’s a better anti-imperialist/global South cadre on X than on any other platform, including the Fediverse. (If you actually care about following the struggles of people on the ground, rather than virtue signaling.) That will be a bit harder to read now though... I am sure an international nitter mirror will pop up eventually.
- kijashdkujdfhas 22d ago
  [flagged]
  - angoragoats 22d ago
    This. Stop going to the Nazi bar, or else you too are effectively a Nazi.

lazzlazzlazz 22d ago

Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.

Melatonic 22d ago
Examples ?

kyle-rb 22d ago

I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more. On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply. I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.

sillysaurusx 22d ago
That sounds infuriating. I hope you can recover your account.
- kyle-rb 22d ago
  My initial suspicion was that my account was flagged because I only used the web version (the PWA experience on mobile is pretty good) so I've been using the Android app the last few days, and I'll see if that has any signal on my account. In another view days I'll try filing a support ticket, maybe claiming something like "I was mass-reported by DSA leftists for my right-wing views"; things along those lines have gotten some peoples' permanent suspensions lifted.
pessimizer 22d ago
> as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
antonvs 22d ago

Brendinooo 22d ago

>What is the main use case for X these days? I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.) I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because... It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site). And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all! >Is it still as popular as it used to be? A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.

kemayo 22d ago
> It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts. X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
- Brendinooo 22d ago
  >amongst the microposting sites I look at "major" was doing a bit of work for me. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that. >would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back This hasn't happened to me in awhile. Dunno if it was a transient thing, an app thing, or something that has been reversed.
  - 22d ago

Marha01 22d ago

> What is the main use case for X these days? There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.

frereubu 22d ago

In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).

defrost 22d ago
A problem for the UK here is things like Rupert Lowe set to be paid as much for divisive posts on X as for being MP - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/24/rupert-lowe-restore-britain-earn-same-on-x-as-being-mp-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/24/rupert-lowe...
dom96 22d ago
They could at least use both. I'm pretty annoyed with Andy Burnham. He's had a Bluesky account that has been pretty active... right up until he became a PM. Would it kill him to get a member of his team to repost his tweets to Bluesky?
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]

spike021 22d ago

I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.

loeg 22d ago

> What is the main use case for X these days? The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.

runjake 22d ago

It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise. If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.

pyinstallwoes 22d ago
What public stats say otherwise?
- runjake 21d ago
  Similarweb shows a consistent ~15% YoY decline. It also shows growth beginning in early Summer, so this trend may be changing as of very recently. Sensor Tower shows a consistent ~10% YoY decline. DataReportal/Kepios shows a ~5.3% decline in ad reach. EU DSA Transparency repoorts shows ~10% decline Pew Research shows a >20% decline in the US. Regardless, I still use X and find a lot of value from the people I follow. I'm paradoxically optimist.

KronisLV 22d ago

> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.

csomar 22d ago

I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine. I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?

yubblegum 22d ago

> What is the main use case for X these days? twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International. a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.

SwellJoe 22d ago
I don't believe the extremism engine of Xitter is reducing the risk of global catastrophe. I think it's accelerating that risk. Certainly it helped elect Trump, and no one can argue that's been good for advancing the cause of peace on earth or avoiding several other causes of mass death.

bonoboTP 22d ago

AI research, computer vision/machine learning academic projects and papers, conferences.

xtracto 22d ago

It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ... As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.

autoexec 22d ago
There should be laws that require all government statements to be published on an official government site and be forever archived there no matter where or however else they were published. That way politicians can take advantage of the reach of social media sites while not requiring anyone to use them and also providing a means for those statements to be verified and preserved.
- conception 22d ago
  There are in the US. Just the current administration doesn’t follow them.
scientifik 22d ago
This right here is the thing that shows how much influence big tech has. Everyone has their anecdotal story about porn, spam, malware or whatever flooding Twitter meanwhile your local city government treats it as an official communications channel.

burningChrome 22d ago

>> What is the main use case for X these days? More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still. >> Is it still as popular as it used to be? Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that. >> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it. X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol

Melatonic 22d ago

Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those. Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all

Lammy 22d ago

My feed is mostly people petting rabbits

angoragoats 22d ago

I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.

CamperBob2 22d ago

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example. And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it. Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.

lemaomao 22d ago
> non-evil people > ML developers and researchers Brother in Christ, pick one.
- lynndotpy 22d ago
  I'm an ML developer and researcher and I left X. A lot of us did and do believe neural networks can provide utility for humanity. There's just a lot of money in drinking the AGI LLM VC WN koolaid. Not everyone has drank that koolaid.

CM30 22d ago

Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter. There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.

j-bos 22d ago

If you want alpha on things x is the place to be, aside from some discord servers. I've recently leaned off hn and onto twitter.

Gigachad 22d ago

It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.

lynndotpy 22d ago

For one of the big use cases, you can look at the NCMEC's reports-by-ESP numbers. For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.