this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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I don't use twitter, but the reason people still do is the same reason people still use reddit.
It's where the people are. Normally this is the part where I use some big exaggerated example of what COULD be happening on twitter and they'd still use it. However, saying "They would still use use it if it catered to pedophiles and nazis" is not only true, because they are, but it's also the most exaggerated example I can think of.
No matter what twitter does, people will still use them, BECAUSE people use them. Twitter has something like 375million people, while Mastadon has varying reported numbers, but I'm seeing 7million, 10million or 12million depending on who's talking. That's still a far cry from 375million.
The hard part is figuring out how many of those 375million are bots.
I stopped when it became X. However it was full of racist, bigotry and hatred before then as well.
I used it to keep up with some content creators and tech companies but I did so by getting an API key and running a cli that only pulled down messages from who I followed. Made it much more bearable and useful.
Since the Xittification, API keys are expensive and I've either followed them elsewhere, or mostly just given up. Some dropped it, but when you have thousands to millions of followers on a platform, from their side, it's hard to lose that audience.
I used to like Twitter when it started, following people and small companies/communities was super easy and the 140char limit nice and terse for both the posters and the ones following. Then it shat the bed and then it got bought out and while some still post there because of followers, most have left or just disappeared.
In the case of content creators, you go where your audience goes. Almost all of the content creators I watch went back to twitter and almost exclusively post only live notices and social updates. I don't have one that has a good opinion of the platform but, there's a much larger audience there so therefore they stay.
Visibility is everything, and there are many steps between following you off the platform and not engaging with your stuff. Many will not follow a creator to an alternative platform if it means having to juggle an additional network, they will just let that creator fall out of their interest group.
I know for a fact I wouldn't be on lemmy if I still used reddit, so any content creator I followed there I dropped. It is too annoying having to juggle multiple social media platforms.
I don't use twitter either, its blocked by choice on my DNS blocker but, the majority on the platform are not a pedo, regardless of the owners of it. It's still really the only valid mainstream option for content creators. Do you have a better option? Because I know bsky or lemmy sure as hell aint going to get the job done for them (they have already tried that and went back due to lack of usage.)
its a circle, creators aren't going to leave the platform because consumers are there, consumers aren't going to leave because creators are there. The only real hope of that changing is either twitter screwing up so hard that they can't stay, or a superior alternative being made that allows both the creator and the viewer to leave at once, so far bsky has come to be the closest but has still fallen short.
edit: changed tone and wording to be less aggressive.
Twitter was useful for getting updates about sports during games - for example, an update on whether a player who was injured might return to the game, or sometimes, more detail on something weird that happened (you'd be shocked at how poorly informed people in the arena are, compared to those watching on TV). A lot of this depends on who is feeding the info, though, and the more recent beat reporters for our favorite hockey team haven't been as active on Twitter, so I closed my account after Musk bought it. Haven't really missed it.
But even today, every article about something that happened in a game will embed a Twitter link for video. Like there's no other possibility - just Twitter.
I'm not defending this, just saying that sports use it extremely heavily.