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Twitter Added Zero New Users Last Quarter Despite Trump Tweets (nypost.com)
Twitter did not add any new users in Q2, a disappointing follow-up to what had been a promising start to 2017. Twitter reported earnings Thursday morning, claiming 328 million total users -- the same number it reported after Q1. Analysts had been hoping the company would add around four million new users last quarter. From a report: Despite its appeal among celebrities and public figures, Twitter has struggled to sustain its closely watched user growth even as it invests in features and live content to help draw viewers and boost user engagement. It is in stiff competition for advertising dollars with other platforms like larger rival Facebook and Snap's messaging app Snapchat. The company also reported a wider quarterly net loss and lower revenue, and said it did not expect its total revenue growth to pick up in the second half of the year. [...] President Donald Trump, one of the most active politicians on Twitter, has tweeted multiple times a day on average since his inauguration in January, according to social media analytics company Zoomph.
I don't need an account to see or hear about his tweets, so why would I sign up? That's the fundamental problem with Twitter, though. It's not a collaborative network; it's a marketing platform.
Twitter is a perfect digital representation of what an empty head sounds like when it rattles.
I'll take this opportunity to point out that this post would make a good tweet.
I have five Twitter accounts. I post to one or another about once a week. I read Twitter...really only if I'm at a con and there's a bunch of feeds related to that (since that's the best way to find out where some action might be).
I mean, that's the sort of thing that is either growing or dying, really, isn't it?
Sounds like people don't want to be on a platform with that idiot taking center stage.
Since it became news that Trump used twitter I have not gone to Twitter for any reason at all. i want to stay as remote from our filthy liar in chief as i can. i am still considering leaving the nation.
Tainted by the awful people who most frequently and publicly post to it, e.g. Kanye, the Kardashians, Trump, and Wesley Crusher.
None of my family or friends tweet anything that I care about, and celebrities, "journalists" and partisan zealots hold no interest for me...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If you ever read "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal" by Nick Bilton, you would know how appalling that the founding of Twitter was. Mark Zuckerburg has a great quote in the book: "[Twitter founders] drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in." It's not really surprising that Twitter had zero growth from riding Trump's pants legs.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-s-tweets-official-statements-spicer-says-n768931
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump's tweets should be taken as official statements...
"The president is president of the United States," Spicer said, "so they are considered official statements by the president of the United States."
other governments should ban any use of twitter within their boundaries
twooter!
You now the rules. Not until Netcraft confirms it.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
hi h r u? du ctc? a/s/l? m/f? #useless
I didn't "get" it, but "everyone" said it was a big thing, so I signed up, found people, followed people relevant to my interests, tried to keep up. Gave it a month, checking in regularly on my account. At the end of the month I walked away, deleted the app and walked away, and never logged in again. At least I tried it but I honestly have no idea why it's so popular, what purpose it serves or how it can create a sustainable business. I can get how Facebook works, I can get how Google works, I can even understand how people make money off free software. But I just don't get Twitter. Are there that many people in the world who can and want to keep up with an endless diarrhea of fairly useless and low value information?
Heard it was useful in making spring arrive early. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Twitter died when it appointed a "trust and safety council".
There's also Gab.ai, which has sprung up in response to complaints about one-sided censorship by the company.
Gab has a much more elegant solution to censorship: if you don't like something, put it on your personal list of "things I don't want to see", and you'll never see those. You can specify users or specific words you don't like.
Compare with Twitter, where you can complain about something being in violation of their rules of conduct for partisan reasons... and most likely it'll get banned.
Lots and lots of people are moving over to gab once they've been banned at twitter.
Usually with a screenshot of their *completely reasonable* post that got them banned.
(Even Scott Adams gets banned and shadow-banned - for nothing more than questioning the science behind global warming. It's almost as if the science behind global warming can't stand up to scrutiny!)
(Several of the recent bannings are for supporting the military trans' ban decision. Almost as if no one is allowed to debate that issue!)
Election season is over. US, UK and France have all held their elections. Maybe there isn't anything for the bots to retweet and talk about any more.
Election season is over. US, UK and France have all held their elections.
no more elections now that we have emperor trump
I probably use Twitter everyday but I don't need an account. It's a part of every single search / new feed / TV new channel, sports broadcast and almost every website I go to.
So modify the product so it appeals to people other than celebrities and public figures. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple didn't become rich by tailoring their products to 1/10th of the 1%. The companies which make lots of money off tiny markets like celebrities and public figures sell very specialized and expensive products. e.g. Limousines. So Twitter needs to decide if they want to be a tool for the few and extremely wealthy, or for the masses, and redesign their product appropriately.
Twitter isn't sustainable in its current form, but it's too popular with media outlets and customer service departments to be a financial dead-end.
There is a way to make it profitable, just not doing what they're currently doing. Perhaps making corporations and verified people pay a small fee to stay verified? I don't know, but as much as it is a media darling, there is a value there, it just needs to be unlocked.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Kinda want to see Twitter go down because as rule social media is kinda dumb. If Twitter falls it will shake investors faith in other platforms. Might be a nice domino effect. Really hopeful something like this could take the wind out of facebooks sails some before Mark succeeds in politically weaponizing. Which will be somewhat hard for him to do thanks to all the hard working cleaver trolls out there but its not impossible.
If the investors could all get spooked and run off first, that would be great.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"A report" is not a good enough source. The quote is not attributed. Where was it copied/pasted from? I'm not talking about the link inside the quote, but the quote itself. Who wrote it?
* The 140 character limit is just plain silly anymore
* They don't have a solid version of more modern apps like SnapChat or WhatsApp.
* Better flow control / Better lists - If you subscribe more then 3-4 big feeds forget seeing anything substantial. Some news site pride themselves on putting out a store or comment every minute. You can use lists but they've become so clunky. Give me something like Facebook that lets me switch between more viewed and the whole steam
* Open the API up again - You killed off hundreds of legitimate website but made it easier for spammers
BTW: What is with the swipe at Trump? Does Trump own Twitter or does Twitter support Trump? Neither is true so this was an unneeded political swipe and click bait. Can we step away from this tripe and stick to the facts.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Politically, I'm a moderate or a centrist. I prefer to take the best ideas of the political right and the best ideas of the political left, rather than sticking myself at one extreme or the other. I'm open to immigration. I want all people to succeed, regardless of their skin color or origin or other attributes. I think healthcare should be affordable and accessible to all. I don't want to see prejudice and hatred.
As a moderate, I used to follow a huge variety of Twitterers. Some were political, some were quite apolitical. I was seeing a huge range of viewpoints, which I really liked. All was good for several years, but then I found things were getting more and more polarized.
It started off relatively mildly, with occasional tweets about Black Lives Matter or sexism or something like that. What started as a trickle soon became a deluge. It got to the point where tweet after tweet was about some kind of -ism or -phobia.
Like I said earlier, I'm open minded, so I started looking into some of the cases that were mentioned in these tweets. Time and time again the incidents mentioned in the tweets relating to BLM ended up involving somebody who actually did violently attack the police, and the police responded with deadly force in self defense. The same would happen when I looked into the cases allegedly involving some sort of -ism or -phobia. The situation would either turn out to be totally overblown, or in some cases it was later revealed that the "incident" being described was nothing but a total fabrication!
Interestingly, I didn't see this happening so much from the Twitterers I'd subscribed to who I'd place on the political right. Their tweets were much more relevant, and when I investigated them further it turned out that what they were saying actually matched reality. They weren't blowing minor incidents out of proportion, for example.
Then the 2016 US election really started heating up. Things got really bad after President Trump won the election. Soon I was deluged with endless tweets droning on about "Drumpf", or cartoons making fun of him for allegedly having orange skin, or snide comments mocking his hairdo. I found it all kind of strange, since leftists are the ones who typically say that bullying and ridiculing people is wrong, especially if it involves their skin color or some other physical attribute they can't control.
The tweets from people who I'd consider to be "right wing" ended up being far more reasonable most of the time. They'd be focusing on real issues, like the economy, border security, and international relations. They wouldn't just be slinging insults. They'd be trying to engage in real discussion, yet most of the replies to their tweets would be petty insults from leftists.
It was getting to the point where for every useful tweet I saw, I'd have to put up with 30 or more pointless tweets filled with petty insults or complaints about non-issues from leftists. Recently it got to the point where I just couldn't put up with it any more. The signal to noise ratio became terrible.
All I wanted was to read were reasonable and intelligent comments questioning the policies and actions of the new US administration. But all I was getting were tweets from leftists about "Drumpf" and "orange skin" and "bad hair" and "intolerance" and "racism" and "transphobia".
So I've quit using Twitter. It stopped providing me with useful content, so I stopped using it. I regret having to do this, as the tweets I was getting from so-called "right wing" Twitterers were typically quite reasonable. It was all of the increasingly nonsensical, negative, and detached-from-reality tweets from leftists that ruined the Twitter experience for me.
Twitter is used extensively by "SEO" marketing guys. They open accounts to generate traffic and SEO queues to google.
It is simply not possible to go a full quarter let alone a day without new Twitter accounts created for marketing.
If the NET AGGREGATE count is down that is a completely different thing then NO NEW Accounts.
I think it's a little unfair on Trump to compare him to Wesley Crusher. :-)
This headline is fake news. Sad..
I had a Twitter account and deleted it a month or so ago. Had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump: it's a stupid way to miscommunicate and I saw no reason to keep it. I would think more people are hanging on to their Twitter accounts to see what he is saying rather than leaving Twitter because of what he said. He may be slowing the landslide, not making it larger.
There is a way to make it profitable, just not doing what they're currently doing. Perhaps making corporations and verified people pay a small fee to stay verified? I don't know, but as much as it is a media darling, there is a value there, it just needs to be unlocked.
On average, Twitter loses $100 million every quarter, which is completely insane. Part of the problem is having 3,000+ employees when they could easily run the business with less than 300. But still, there just simply is no "value to be unlocked".
If there was a way for Twiiter to be profitable, they would have found it by now. This idea of "there's a magic answer out there somewhere, we just have to find it" is complete bullshit.
Sure, it's popular among the brain-dead, but as an ongoing business, it's just a stupid, unworkable idea, and 10 years of massive losses that proven that.
As a fun aside, it seems to me that the only thing in nature that is either growing or dying (as in, not biologically successful if it ceases growing) is cancer.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Assuming this data is accurate, Twitter's user base seems to have hit market saturation sometime around the start of 2015. The service has remained pretty much the same since they began it, so why would anyone expect that there are suddenly more people who aren't using Twitter that have decided that they want to use it? There was a significant uptick in the first quarter of this year (possibly attributable to Twitter being Trump's medium of choice), but anyone who thought that was sustainable growth was crazy.
but it's too popular with media outlets and customer service departments to be a financial dead-end.
So was myspace. Twitter isnt going to be gone tomorrow but if they start making the changes required to monetize it effectively people may slowly leave or decide not to bother.
What Twitter needs to probably do is, a heck of a lot less. Don't police it, fire everyone but a core team of developers host everything in the could. Keep it mostly text and allow third party hosting of images, and other content to keep the bandwidth costs down. It will earn plenty of ad revenue to keep Jack and some core people in fancy suits for decades. If they let the thing just be a website rather than trying to be a whole damn media company with one real product that anyone cares about.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Not if there are bot followers to buy. The horror has just begun! He'll be talking to himself and mindless automatons... Ok, so no change, you're right. Carry on.
Sorry to tell ya, but politics season is over for another year or so. Most voters won't care until 2018 and some not even then. As far as Trump goes, who cares WHAT he is saying. I mean really, why bother reading it? He says one thing, then another that usually contradicts the last thing he said and sometimes he'll even flip flop again. The only thing we should be really doing is watching what actually HAPPENS.
Actions of the government are much more important then hot air from elected officials. They all tell half truths at best and lie at worst.
By the way, I didn't vote for Hillary or Trump. I'm glad Trump beat Hillary but really I blame the DNC for not giving Bernie a fair primary. I ended up voting for "What's a Leppo?" Gary Johnson. Technically, given his platform, not knowing about Aleppo isn't so bad as the Libertarian party does tend to look more inward instead of the Middle East and Syria, where we don't actually belong and certainly not in the capacity we are there.
Obviously he didn't get far but that probably has more to do with how unfair our debates are setup. Had he got 15% of the votes to get up on stage for the big debates, the other two parties would of changed the rules to 25% of the vote instead.
So yeah, Twitter isn't getting more account sign ups because anyone who isn't already following Trump will hear about anything really big on the regular news channel.
I don't know, pretty much everything plant or animal is always growing and dying. Its just a few cells here and few cells there at a time. Pretty much when new stuff quits growing the organism as a whole dies eventually.
Cancer is really just an unsustainable growth rate.
In the case of Twitter, you need to add people at some rate because the older accounts might not be closed but they are as good as dead. The less their owners use them, the few page views the less the ad revenue generated. Twitter either needs new blood all the time or needs a gimmick to get existing account holders excited and coming back to state where they are heavy users again.
There are probably a few celebrities and trolls who tweet entirely to much, and they represent twitters cancers because they squeeze out/drive off/offend the good tweets and twitter users. So the that makes the "safety panel" or whatever they call it Twitters chemotherapy. Its kills the cancers but also a lot of interesting content many people want as well, and that also causes a loss of users, or damage to the surrounding tissue.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
As a fun aside, it seems to me that the only thing in nature that is either growing or dying (as in, not biologically successful if it ceases growing) is cancer.
How is cancer not biologically successful per your definition? Especially the 15% of human cancers that are caused by viruses. So what if it kills a host, it just moves on to another ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Twitter is losing users. Sad!
I really doubt no one signed up for Twitter in the past three months. They just had as many users quit as joined.
Much "Bigly MAGA" from "Texas Oblast"!~
I wanted to open an account to follow some people whose work I'm interested in.
An hour after creating the account, having done nothing with it, It's been locked and I've been told that it looks like I'm a bot registering multiple accounts and the only way to unlock it is to authenticate though my phone number.
So I wrote to support that it seems like a pretty scammy way to get my phone number, and I'd be happy to talk to them, but I'm not interested in handing out that sort of information.
Never heard back from them.
Trump has little to do with Twitter's growth or decline, or lack of either. Twitter as you state is tainted, but not just by celebrity types. Censorship has probably as much to do with the lack of growth, and the surge of competing products vowing not to censor.
Twitter seems to be a big deal with media agencies who watch each others tweets, celebrities that follow each other, bots who don't care who they spam, and bot makers who think people are still actively joining in. Yeah yeah, some people follow that stuff too, but not enough for all the hype it gets.
Trump is only mentioned for the Trump vs anti-Trump posts that seem to come with anything these days.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I don't think "despite" is the correct word.
So did about 20 other people I know... That is more than Zero. This appears to be fake news.
Twitter, huh, good god
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing, listen to me
Oh, twitter, I despise
'Cause it means destruction of innocent minds
Twitter means tears to thousands of American eyes
Where the president* goes and lies
And despised, truth dies
I said Twitter, huh good god, why'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing, say it again
*president, so called
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
Twitter is the new MySpace, only people who are hopelessly uncool and out of touch continue to use it.
Because twitter is a one way street... Create an account; follow a user, etc. Not to mention all the marketing garbage on it (like all the other social media platforms). I personally dont care about certain individuals to "follow" them all the time.
people who want to read the tweets of the President don't need a twitter account to read them. and twitter has instituted policies as of late that turns may people off from joining for example the "Trust and Safety console" https://about.twitter.com/safe... which has on its board a very loaded selection for example the perpetrator of the famous vid-con "Garbage Human" incident On the other hand the platform Minds.com is growing based on its policies based of free speech.
I really doubt no one signed up for Twitter in the past three months.
Yeah, I did join recently myself.
Of course I'll never post on it, and it's blocked on third-party websites with AdBlock (and I'll probably use Request Policy again soon, because the situation on the web is certainly still worsening... it's painful to configure, particularly when new domains are used during form posting, like payment processors, but less painful than not using it...).
I only registered because Twitter recently started forcing guests to register to view comments and replies. I'm surprised no one is talking about it. Maybe it's still localized (I'm in France), and not applied yet for the US...? It certainly isn't uncommon, and multiple big websites like Facebook have already been doing it for quite some time now (mixed with privacy settings, but not only...), but it's new for Twitter...
Seeing this news now, it is clear that the two events are linked... They're not getting enough new subscribers, so they decided to start forcing people to register, just to see comments and replies...
Yeah, sure, "I could live in a cave (for a few days), so it's not really forced"... But I don't. In particular, more and more websites are using Twitter for status updates, and comments/replies can contain important pieces of information, including by the website owners or staff... I also had the case of Twitter being the only place I found some people I wanted to contact... There's also a lot of artists who post their work on Twitter, with additional info in comments or in replies... (like download links, passwords, descriptions, etc).
I asked my neighbor lady if she loaded up twitter to follow President Trump.
Her answer: "If I wanted to listen to a fat, arrogant, crazy old man, I wouldn't have gotten a divorce."
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Of Trump tweets.
Twitter died when it appointed a "trust and safety council".
Everybody who wants to be on twitter is.
They are kicking people off for non-SJW reasons as fast as people grow out of diapers well enough to twit something. There are competitors popping up to go to now too.
Why would there be an increase in twitter accounts considering the two items above?
Stopped using it due to these things. Reached a point where my opinion was likely going to cause people to start screeching if I was honest, so between Twitter censoring what I saw and self censoring myself to keep the peace, I'm very very glad I left.
It's just a total political whine great now and a circle jerk off let's feel good for whatever reason today stuff.
Shame, the breaking news was quite useful.
Well, Trump got elected because of the Democrats.
All they had to do was supply a less bad option.
They failed to do that.
Simple really, isn't it?
Given a choice between incompetent and evil, incompetent is a better choice every time.
Trump is a loudmouth, which is a refreshing change from all the secret backdoor deals the Dems seem to love so much these days.
Dems can only blame themselves for this situation..
Stop rejecting account creation if the user is using Tor. Also stop collecting people's phone number.
... the mainstream news media love to report on who tweeted what, and "who" is usually come celebrity cretin or venal politician.
I think it's a scream that they haven't YET caught on to one of the things Trump is doing with it.
His tweets aren't JUST about getting to his supporters unfiltered by the lamestream media. (Most of his supporters don't follow them. There are other ways for him to get the word out that doesn't have the same set of gatekeepers.)
Every time he wants to get something done without the newsies jumping on it or anyone organize real opposition to it, he posts some outrageous tweet about something else. "Here: Look at THIS shiny thing!" Then they all go off and flame him for a news cycle or two while he gets what he wants done.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By the same way Facebook is ruined.
Political correctness and filtering.
I used to post on twitter before with loooots of coverage / month and when they decided to become "responsible" all that was dead.
Why should I post if only my followers see my posts? Hard to get much of a following then.
What we need is a free world or a free country willing to host peoples opinions freely.
Wish my country did it and in a separate time-line without mass-immigration it likely could have and worked for political refugees / people who had trouble speaking their minds instead, but with mass-immigration / political genocide of my own people it has become much more important to control speech than letting people raise their opinions.
Twitter is run by Progressives that cater to left wing victim groups. Reasonable people get this and many have abandoned the platform. Progressives ruin everything. Fuck them.
Twitter had censorship long before they dreamed up the Orwellian "Trust and Safety" star chamber.
On this website is a proposal to democratize Twitter: https://www.buytwitter.org/
If Silicon Valley can disrupt whole industries, why not innovate with company ownership, too?
With chaotic stock prices and politics threatening Twitter, we want to save "the people's news network" as a vital public utility. That's why we propose Twitter study ways to build user loyalty and increase shareholder value, through broad-based ownership and accountability similar to a co-op.
There's obviously a need for standards to cover things like harassment, threats, and illegal content. But Dorsey's Twitter doesn't stop there. Look at the 'Trust & Safety Council' they formed, which includes the Anti-Defamation League and Feminist Frequency - two groups well known for being as politicised as they are censorious.
Look at how their bans, de-verification, and shadow bans are applied far more often when the politics of the user aren't aligned with leftist progressive points. It's fine to have a political bias so long as you declare it, but they don't. They simply apply their rules based on political views, and that creates an uncertain environment. Why would I invest time in a platform that may arbitrarily cripple me account for upsetting the the social justice hive mind? As a business, why would I use this platform for customer outreach if I know Twitter to be hell-bent on alienating anyone to the left of Jeremy Corbyn?
Dorsey's strategy for growth is to apply ideological censorship and to permit the regressive left to harass people for having the wrong political views? Let's see if it pays off.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
They can't grow anymore because they're shadowbanning everyone who calls it out or any of the conspiracy connected to it. Twitter is more interested in keeping its top brass out of jail than in sustaining its business model. They're done. Jack Dorsey is done. Forever in every way.
So was myspace.
The big difference between Myspace and Twitter (and incidentally, Myspace is still open and running) is that MySpace was popular with a bunch of spotty teens with no money but not really the general population or corporations. Twitter is popular with media outlets and service departments. There is money in the pockets of people using Twitter- Twitter just need to learn how to extract it without scaring people off.
I definitely think you're right, they need to cut staff, but I think they could perhaps take payment from the media outlets and service departments that use them. I small fee to all the Walmarts, Wendy's, and BBCs of the world (and every other "Verified account" could make them a lot of money. Keep the general population happy by not charging them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Maybe they should develop a few more tutorials that shows how to use your Arduino or RasPi to tweet your thermometer's reading or whether your dog has triggered the proximity sensor...
Why do I need Twitter? If I want to see Trump tweets, I just have to wait until the MSM reports on them later in the day, and talks about how stupid they are ad-nauseum.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And this is different from Obama, how? Oh, he had a pen and a phone, big difference.
Drop the partisanship, and think for yourself.
I voted for Obama twice.
People like you, with your hate and lies and preference for illegal immigrants and fraudulently imported indentured servants (H1-B) over white Americans convinced me to vote for Trump. Also because the Dems fraudulently and contra-constitutionally made it impossible for me to vote for Sanders.
Guess what, white votes matter. Just like the Dems screamed for decades, I voted for my interests.
Even the Democratic leadership gets it now, with their platform about economic issues, jobs, etc. At least they are finally giving lip service. SHillary couldn't even bring herself to do that.
Signed - one of the people you and your leaders consider deplorable.
Go ahead, tell me to fuck off like you have to others. You will just grow the ranks of your opposition and make it less and less likely that we will ever vote for Dems again.
In the whole world? Not ONE? Yep, that's a bad quarter. Does anyone know what Twitter's business model is?
I deleted my Twitter account because it devolved into a litany of ad hominem attacks and I was inundated with a constant barrage of banal and repetitive tweets about useless crap.
The major news always aggregates more than I will ever want to know about celebrities and political clap-trap, all of it amounting to a #swamp of misspellings and misinformation and uninformed opinions.
If I want entertainment, I watch Netflix, because our public airwaves have been coopted by advertisements aimed mostly at the affluent and the easily frightened souls who are sickly results of our industrialized food system and the consumerization of our economy.
Oh, and we have allowed lawyers to make taking personal responsibility and the use of common sense a rarity, while anyone with enough money can literally get away with mass murder.
Even our postal system has been perverted to subsidize the worthless junk mail that inundates us all with unwanted advertisements that businesses can use to reduce their tax burdens at the expense of the legitimate uses of first class mail that are still required for certain legal transactions and (mostly) secure communications.
PlaynBass