Mid September, Elon Musk live streamed a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu on X. In it, Musk floated a plan to charge all users for X. Even by Musk’s exceedingly high standards, this plan was vague, unrealistic and half-baked. That the plan was not particularly well thought out was confirmed on this week’s Code Conference. X CEO Linda Yaccarino was asked about these plan by Elon Musk, and did not appear to know about these plans, and managed to make this clear in one of the most painfully cringe ways possible. However, it drove a significant news cycle, and spurred quite some people to make the jump from X to other platforms:
- Bluesky added some 60k users in the 24 hours after the news, roughly 4 times its average daily growth number.
- Mastodon added around 30k users in the 24 hours after the news, around 6 times its average daily new signups.
Note that these numbers happened only after a comment by Elon Musk, these plans were not actually implemented (yet?).
Yesterday, Elon Musk changed X again, removing all the headlines from links posted on X. This change has a significantly negative impact on X’s function of sharing news, as it is now virtually impossible to know what link you are clicking on (or even see that the image is indeed a link). What stands out to me however is that this did not drive a signup cycle to either Bluesky or Mastodon at all:
- Bluesky added some 15k users, which is in line with the average of the last week.
- Mastodon added some 6k users, which is also the same as the average of the last week.
This indicates that an actual change which negatively impacts the X platform right now does not necessarily drive a signup wave to other services, but perceived changes can.
https://laurenshof.online/what-drives-people-to-move-away-from-x/
