Is this an X odus that we are witnessing? The Bluesky vs X war is raging, it seems. For the past few days, we’ve heard the same old song and dance on the rooftops, and journalists and celebrities are now coming out to explain that they have left X, often because of Elon Musk’s own personality. We’re also hearing about the flurry of heated or aggressive debates on the platform, in particular about political opinions and the ban on X in Brazil. Visionary Marketing investigates in this short morning report.
X odus to Bluesky: truth or fiction?
Zdnet shows that Bluesky’s subscriber growth is indeed rapid.
Since the US presidential election, Bluesky has snagged more than 1 million new members, a company spokesperson told The New York Times on Tuesday. The platform now has more than 15 million users, according to the latest stats, up from 9 million in early September and 12 million around mid-October.
Lance Whitney 13/11/24 – Zdnet
At the same time, X has watched its numbers dwindle. This past April, the Musk-owned platform had around 611 million users, according to stats from Statista and other sources. At last count, that number had dropped to 586 million. The decline has been especially felt in the US and UK, according to The Financial Times, as spotted by Social Media Today. But even in the EU, the number of X users fell by 5% over the first half of 2024.
Ibid.
X odus: Up and Down
For some years now, the number of X subscribers has been going up and down. There have been waves of departures… followed by returns celebrated in thunderous fashion by X’s managers, starting with its South African cowboy of an owner. Quoted by the Innovations.fr site, the following figure from analysis company Appfigures (data not publicly available) is quite stunning:
[…] “Bluesky downloads in the US have jumped 933% since the start of the year, compared to just 48% for X. On 10 November alone, Bluesky downloads had increased by 624% compared to 1 November. More than one million people joined the platform in one week, mainly from the US, Canada and the UK.”
Something Is Happening Now
In conclusion, yes, there is (finally) something happening on the platform that we thought was well and truly in the process of dying a premature death. But to call it an Xodus or a tidal wave would be going too far. However, we need to remain cautious, because the real change could come from opinion leaders or stars who could indeed leave Musk’s platform and move to Dorsey’s (who, by the way, has let go of the reins to return to X… ironic isn’t it?)
Jack Dorsey says he quit Bluesky because it was becoming another Twitter Businessinsider *
05/24 – source
* NDLR The above piece was probably written at least in part by AI (25% detection on ZeroGPT.com), which is nothing new for Businessinsider, which I’ve already caught red-handed.
It’s worth noting in passing that Bluesky’s formula is exactly the same as Twitter’s, so it’s hard to see how it could become anything else but clone of its former self… minus the subscribers. According to Perplexity.ai’s search results, here are the celebs who have publicly announced their departure from X for Bluesky. I’ve cross-referenced this information.
US political figures
– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) – US Democratic representative
UK political figures– Greg Davies – British comedian for Instagram and not Bluesky
– Jess Philips – Labour minister for Home Office
– Lewis Atkinson – Labour MPOrganisations
– Berlin Film Festival (departure announced for 15 December) – We’ll figure out who lives to tell about it in the future…
Communities
– The “Swifties” (Taylor Swift fans) – A notable exodus from this community is mentioned – another exaggeration.
Note that
– Taylor Swift herself hasn’t left X, but hasn’t posted there since 15 October [that’s right, I checked. How long will she be true to her word?]
Perplexity points out that “the list is not comprehensive”.
More interestingly, the Guardian declared to have left X in November 2024. Other more obscure personalities have reportedly taken the plunge. However, it will take a little more time to provoke an X odus, which has not yet been proven. Finally, we should point out that the engagement is announced as higher on Bluesky than X. It’s perfectly understandable, since the larger the community, the lower the engagement. In the meantime, find us on Bluesky.
Some thoughts on AI-assisted research
As a test, I used Perplexity.ai to search for information on this piece and I must humbly confess that, although I found what I wanted, it didn’t really save any time. Rephrasing prompts is, after all, more time-consuming than entering a few keywords on DuckDuckGo. In fact, I got so fed up with it that I ended up growing information that way.
Widespread Confusion
Finally, the ‘pro’ mode, which reproduces the ‘chain of thought’, is very slow and ends up getting on your nerves after a few searches. Incidentally, I’ve opted for the paid version of Perplexity, but haven’t noticed any striking advantage over the free version. Either it’s the free version that’s too good, or it’s the pay version that’s not good enough (I’m still testing).
The mix of AI engines on Perplexity (which gives access to Claude access and OpenAI, etc.) is also very confusing, because such AI engines are very different, you need several of them to complete a single task. Yet another waste of time. Finally, the fact that these tools add links in text form means that one wastes a lot of time compared to search engines. Even if it is possible to ask them to put them back in the body of the text, this requires unnecessary extra handling.
And frankly, these long-winded prompts are very tiresome. I’m not sure it’s such a good interface. We’ll still need a lot of time to really assess the impact of generative AI on search quality. I’m not sure that delegating thinking to a clueless machine is a guarantee of quality on the find of the right data. Beyond the rose-coloured spectacle view of a machine that searches all by itself, at the end of the day we will really need to take stock of the quality of the work performed. Once again, innovation is measured over time.
