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Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible (niemanreports.org)

submitted 8 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] alyaza@beehaw.org 85 points 8 months ago

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

[-] mp3@lemmy.ca 46 points 8 months ago

Hopefully that hurts the social media platforms more than they want to admit.

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 25 points 8 months ago

It does, social media is very headline driven. I’m not surprised traffic wasn’t affected much

[-] loke@fedia.io 17 points 8 months ago

It can't be headline driven if you remove the headlines. Musk, probably

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 7 points 8 months ago

All for the E S T H E T I C

[-] athos77@kbin.social 54 points 8 months ago

Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team, writes in the staff memo that spending less time on Twitter has helped with staff burnout. “That’s both due to the lower manual lift — and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” Nett writes.

Snark and contrarianism, on reddit?! I'm shocked!

[-] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 19 points 8 months ago

Plenty of snark and contrarianism on Threads don’t know what dafuq they are talking about, sounds like nonesense.

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 14 points 8 months ago

There are just less people on Threads.

[-] HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org 41 points 8 months ago

Good. I hope people and organizations keep leaving.

[-] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The level of ad dollars flying away from Twitter this year has been staggering. Elon has come back from a lot of shit in the past, but I don't think he'll ever be able to recover it from this, it's just going to be a long circle downward. He's truly lost the plot on this one, and the world's already moved on. Truth be told, I haven't understood Twitter for years anyways, but that's just me.

Ad buyers are demanding accountability for their spends. They want to see justifiable results from their campaigns, so that means heavy measurement that can attribute their spend to quantifiable lifts. Meanwhile, over at twitter? You have a billionaire having a mid life crisis and sticking his thumbs in his ears going lalalalala, pissing off his entire user base and basically taking stances on his platform that no reasonable ad buyers can realistically support. Also doesn't help when your user base is quickly turning into mostly far right wing maniacs. Not going to survive this new age of advertising, when that's pretty much your whole funding model.

[-] dumples@kbin.social 22 points 8 months ago

I think everyone is seeing that the worth of social media isn't worth what you need to pay now

[-] tal@lemmy.today 5 points 8 months ago

said dumples on social media

[-] dumples@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago

Is fediverse social media? I never considered reddit or this social media. More like a forum

[-] flipht@kbin.social 16 points 8 months ago

It's social media in the technical definition - it's a place to view media, both entertainment and news, with commentary, groups, the ability to follow someone, etc. Which makes it social.

But yeah, it's not quite like Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn. A little bit like Twitter though.

[-] dumples@kbin.social 5 points 8 months ago

Yeah. I guess you're right. I just don't follow anyone and without real names it seems different

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 5 points 8 months ago

Different kinds of social media have different focuses. Reddit and forum style have a bit less focus on the person and more focus on the content than Twitter because of how people interact with the platform itself. Twitter is very person centric, encouraging you to follow people to cut through the noise. Having communities which surface voted content puts more emphasis on the community than the individual and draw out the timeframe of algorithm engagement.

[-] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

I think you are going to start seeing an ad exodus from social, that's my prediction. Connected TV ad spend is going to be what catches all the ad dollars in 2024, especially if Netflix and Amazon start sliding towards exposing their viewers to more ads. Social media is going to start its long decline as a result, turning into pay to play as they all try to survive a world with declining ad revenues.

[-] uphillbothways@kbin.social 14 points 8 months ago

Being insufferable is a great way to become redundant. Doesn't matter if you're a platform or a person, rich or poor. Anything can be more trouble than it's worth. And if you are given the chance to stop and think about it, it's probably been true for a while already.