I was never a big fan of Twitter, and I don’t find the Elon Musk-owned X to be much of an improvement. Twitter was already in decline when Elon Musk (unwisely, in my opinion) purchased the site for $44 billion in October 2022.
Complain about Facebook all you want—but at least Facebook is mostly inhabited by real people. X consists almost entirely of sock puppet accounts, which are increasingly located outside the US.
And while there is too much political nonsense on Facebook, real people do still post real content from their lives there. X is all political screeds and political memes. (Oh—and ads, too.)
Then there is the fact that, as noted above, Twitter was in decline even before Elon Musk and the 2024 election. US usage of Twitter peaked in 2017, almost nine years ago. The platform has been losing US engagement ever since.
What about Bluesky—the so-called anti-X, you ask?
Uh, hell no. Bluesky is nothing more than the leftwing, mirror image of X. Just as I have no interest in reading MAGA slogans and memes posted by bots, I also have no interest in an endless, repetitive stream of anti-Trump/GOP posts written by sock puppet accounts. (From what I’ve seen, there aren’t a lot of real people on Bluesky, either.)
Life is too short. Moreover, only about 6 percent of US adults use Bluesky regularly, and that number is not expected to grow.
I do plan to keep my X account in 2026, and I may make the occasional post there, perhaps once or twice per month. Any more than that is beyond the point of diminishing returns.
-ET