Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EFF is leaving X

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: EFF is leaving X

#721

Post by mrguyorama »

pmdr wrote: post #234

> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.

>Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.

The entire point of microblogging platforms like twitter is for you to be terminally online.

What the heck else do you call the service that invented "You can SMS your updates from wherever, and it will be sent out to all your followers"?

Having to "Keep up" like that is what being terminally online is

Re: EFF is leaving X

#723

Post by [deleted] »

lynndotpy wrote: post #375
pmdr wrote: post #234

> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.

> X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media. This is not true at all, and it's a silly statement. X isn't mainstream anymore, and the people who think it is are simply stuck in a bubble. I suspect you might be one of the "terminally online people" you're denigrating as not "regular people". X's MAU is in the ballpark as Quora or Pinterest. "Pinterest gets you more eyes tha…

[deleted]

Re: EFF is leaving X

#724

Post by willdr »

pmdr wrote: post #234

> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.

What are you talking about? X is exclusively the domain of terminally-online people.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#725

Post by mememememememo »

> Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.

... paraphrase: meet people where they are at ....

Sounds even more contradictory now!

And the traffic loss doesn't explain it. That is a sunk cost fallacy.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#726

Post by mememememememo »

mghackerlady wrote: post #85
Ajedi32 wrote: post #71

Their logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...

there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff

Sounds like: I wont get out of bed for $100k

Re: EFF is leaving X

#727

Post by mrguyorama »

matt-attack wrote: post #154
bakugo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The fact that their Threads account[0] is still active (remember that site? yeah, me neither, I had forgotten it existed until I saw it linked on eff.org's socials page) makes it clear that the opening statement about "the numbers not working out" is deceptive. You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites: > people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers…

[flagged]

How is the EFF charter incompatible with saying "Queer folks"?

What are you even saying with this criticism? Do you think queer folks were never going to come up in "Digital rights"?

Re: EFF is leaving X

#728

Post by mememememememo »

ijk wrote: post #714
ghshephard wrote: post #704

"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year." 13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free…

> We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven…

I hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that.

What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit.

E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#729

Post by slg »

TiredGuy wrote: post #650
traderj0e wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".

Re: EFF is leaving X

#730

Post by jl6 »

cbsmith wrote: post #673
jl6 wrote: post #625

Seems like any activist org should have two audiences: 1) Supporters who may become donors 2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters. If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose. Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve…

You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.

I read the post.

> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.

Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.

What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.

Post reply on HN