Change to Twitter Suggests Elon Musk Is Panicking Over Users Leaving for Bluesky

He is scared.

Nothing to See

X proprietor Elon Musk seems to be spooked by the continuous flow of users leaving the social media platform in favor of alternate options like BlueSky and Meta’s Threads.

In a stunning transfer final week, Musk introduced that the platform would begin permitting customers to cover likes, shares, and reposts — a suspicious resolution that appears like a bid to hide the platform’s waning power.

“Now you can conceal engagement buttons and numbers under every put up and work together with posts by way of customized swipe gestures!” X app developer Could Ly tweeted final week.

Musk himself resorted to an odd excuse for the brand new characteristic.

“It is a lot cleaner with engagement numbers turned off,” he wrote. “You may nonetheless see view depend for those who care.”

Grass Greener

Why Musk would immediately care a couple of “cleaner” consumer interface is a little bit of a thriller. Ever since taking on the social media platform in 2022, the corporate has littered the community with a complicated array of coloured checkmarks, pointless information, and a barrage of disruptive adverts.

However it does not take a lot studying between the strains to surprise if X is listening to the astronomic rise of Twitter alternate options BlueSky and Threads. Over the previous week alone, BlueSky’s every day lively customers have soared to 3.5 million, an enormous 300 p.c enhance since Election Day, in line with Similarweb.

As of earlier this month, Threads had a whopping 275 month-to-month lively customers. However due to its breakneck momentum, Bluesky is starting to close the gap the place it issues.

Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously paying attention, with many former Twitter energy customers selecting Bluesky as an alternative of Threads within the wake of the election.

In the meantime, Musk’s X has carried out quite a few user-hostile coverage modifications, from requiring users to opt out of getting their posts be used to coach the platform’s AI chatbot to dismantling the block function, thereby opening the floodgates for much more harassment.

Hate speech and even child sexual abuse material have run rampant on X ever since Musk took over, turning the platform right into a hellhole of disinformation and exploitation.

Final week, Musk additionally appeared to confirm that X was actively throttling the visibility of posts that embrace exterior hyperlinks, an indication that the platform may very well be searching for methods to close out exterior information.

In brief, who might blame customers for working away?

Extra on Bluesky: Zuckerberg Seems Genuinely Alarmed by the Explosive Growth of Bluesky