Why is X, Formerly Twitter, Still Successful?

After Elon Musk acquired ownership of Twitter on October 2022, many thought it will fold up and close shop. Musk even told advertisers who withdrew to "go fuck yourself," he abandoned most content moderation, and infamously changed the logo from a friendly blue bird to a cold X. At the end of 2022, The Verge published a news package declaring that 2023 would go down as "The Year Twitter Died."

Yet, it is still here. Why? Because no one can literally compete with it.

Pebble, Narwhal, Spoutible, Spill, Post, Cohost, Threads and Bluesky cannot hold water when they stand side by side against X. When big news hits, like a major sporting event or a sitting president's decision to drop out of the race or the attempted assassination of a former president, X is where the conversation erupts and not on these upstarts.

As a result, most of the challengers have folded.

Pebble got about 20,000 registered users before stagnating and shutting down in November 2023. It lives on as a smaller server on Mastodon, which itself peaked at 2.5 million active users in December 2022 but is down to about 865,000.

Cohost, made by the Anti Software Software Club (which describes itself as "a not-for-profit software company that hates the software industry"), said last month that it was running out of money and would become read-only by the end of the year.

When Post, a platform "built for news," launched in fall 2022, publishers like Politico, The Boston Globe, and Fortune signed up, and hundreds of thousands of people joined the waitlist. But it shut down in April 2024, citing slow growth that gave it no path toward becoming a "significant platform."

Narwhal, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, marketed itself as a platform for "productive discussions grounded in good faith." After a few months, Narwhal pivoted to become an AI software-as-a-service platform, Speakeasy AI, which aimed to enable civil, engaging dialogue on other platforms.

Those who criticize Twitter/X were observed to be taking a smothering, paternalistic view of social media, in which a moderator maintains the "safety" of the discussion by eliminating discussion deemed "toxic", untrue or hateful, and in "building up" designated communities.

However, the market is full of resilient adults, and who doesn't need to be "protected" online by others. Most can fend for ourselves, and are not so fragile that harsh or deceitful discussions actually harm them. The often raucous public discourse does not scare them, while the prospect of a "tamed" and externally controlled discourse is something that they cannot withstand.