EFF is leaving X

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019.

When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.

This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.

Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.

I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.

EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.

This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do.

I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.

It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.

(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)

I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.

I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.

> 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.

>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.

Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com?

I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.

>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.

Does this not apply to X users?

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...

Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.

"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 ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.

This seems completely unnecessary and performative. I have a hard time understanding how reducing their reach could possibly be helpful to the goals of the organization. I'm definitely going to keep donating to them, but I'm concerned.

These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.

That statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns that they value more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc).

Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.

Interesting timing - just days after the announcement that Nicole Ozer will be taking over for Cindy Cohn as the Executive Director of EFF.

There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?

Is there any site that keeps track of companies/orgs and/or noteworthy people who have left "X"? I've noticed some pretty significant orgs leaving in the recent year or two and have repeatedly wondered if there's some kind of list out there. I mean, it would just be a handy list to show people when I say something like "more and more people are leaving that garbage site" and they want receipts and I'm like... "uh the province of New Brunswick was the latest I saw" >_> I found this list of celebrities in the meantime, at least: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/twitter-celebr...

On the topic of leaving X but not TikTok and Facebook: I think being principled but pragmatic is necessary more so than ever. If you always pick absolutes, you'll quickly find yourself helping nobody. It requires a right balance, otherwise you end up justifying the means to an end. Certain principles cannot be comrpromised, others are a bit of a luxury. It's a moving target. It's a fuzzy target. You'll never quite get it right but you just keep trying. I think I'm most wary of those who think too rigidly and would see this as an intolerable contradiction.

I tend to almost only use X now. I really can't use Facebook or Instagram since the introduction of "ad breaks" because I haven't given them ability to give me "personalised ads".

Don't get me started on tiktok...

"But You're Still on X?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.

EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.

Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use X every day. This platform hosts mutual aid networks and serves as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the app isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:

You own a small business that depends on X for customers. Your abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community. Our presence on X is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how this platform suppresses marginalized voices, enables invasive behavioral advertising, and flags posts. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.

We stay because the people on this platform deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.

EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.

This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement

They will accomplish nothing and be happy, like so many.

I used to respect the exodus, but these days my mental heuristics go off with red alert at the sight of a Bluesky icon replacing Twitter in a website footer.

"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."

EFF knows its audience. No doubt that's why "X" isn't working so well for them.

Most tech professionals do not fit these categories, however much powers that be have tried to change that.

Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.

I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?

Hmmm... They talk about inability to reach out to people at Twitter... but isn't this more about market correction? I often thought that EFF on Twitter was artificially boosted because they were often visible in contexts that really had nothing to do with their core mission. Current Twitter management did state afaik and understand to stop this kind of thing from happening.

So of course it probably feels bad from EFF's perspective that they are no longer receiving the "50 to 100 million impressions a month" and instead get more realistic "2 million views" per post. Which I'd assume is probably better reflection of the natural size of their audience.

Even if this comparison is wrong... Another way to think about this is The GNU/Linux desktop marketshare. For a long-time it was some fraction of a 1% of users. Those users cared about their digital rights (among other things) more than the inconveniences it caused them. And that group is a really small faction of the whole desktop market.

I'm not saying EFF's message isn't important. But I doubt that it ever was interesting enough to naturally receive "50 to 100 million impressions a month" even back in 2018.

I follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.

So they are chasing engagement, and X isn't giving them the attention they think they deserve.

The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.

I don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?

What is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?

Are they leaving because of low views? This means they are more concerned about views than anything else? I thought any sane company wants as much exposure anywhere no matter the political stance or other views.

I must confess this is an odd decision. It's true that the drop in engagement is abismal (97% reduction is ouch). However, given that they're still posting in other sites, what's the marginal cost of keeping X in the equation? Presumably they're using some aggregator where you compose the post once and it gets automatically posted to BlueSky, Mastodon, Thread, etc., what's the cost of keeping X?

if you're a political action group then voluntarily choosing to limit the eyeballs on the ideas you're trying to espouse seems so counterproductive and antithetical for your raison d'être that it's hard not to look at this as shooting oneself in the foot. The PR person who thought this up is doing more harm than good. There's no way the metrics will improve because of this decision.

If they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological.

Which is fine but just be honest about it.

If we would talk about my local pizza restaurant here: Very nice move.

For EFF: That's ~15 years too late, and way too specific. Their job (without them ever having realized in fact) was to generate some force against these centralized commercial walled gardens, where we have our public discourse, with some opaque algorithms deciding what goes up and what goes down.

>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" >Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.

But then there's no explanation really.

I still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.

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 the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire.

The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.

They make valid suggestions on improvements for X. Unfortunately, they undercut their credibility by complaining that their tweets don't get seen as often anymore. Sounds like sour grapes from a group that thinks they deserve special treatment.

imagine writing a post explaining that after careful deliberation you're no longer copying and pasting your posts from one website to another and trying to pass that off as strategy

This reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.

Something like leaving X and staying on Linkedin (and the other platforms) is kinda funny

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120

Well, at least they realize they're hypocrites.

Honestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed:

https://x.com/EFF

Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention:

https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20

Also, people want to hear from individuals or a distinct voice, not an organization:

https://x.com/FFmpeg

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.

Coming soon, on a long enough timeline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

Any chance they keep an RSS?

Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU

I honestly enjoyed the article and agree with their move but I did have a chuckle reading all the way through and then see g right there under the article the X social media sharing icon.

I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.

Weird. I've shifted more and more of my social media use to X. Especially the last few weeks have been great with Artemis and an algorithmic accident that X's auto translation feature has been enabling tons of positive cross cultural communication with people from Japan. It's more fun than I've ever had on social media. Reddit on the other hand has been completely dying.

I cancelled my X subscription this month, despite them trying to offer me a lower price. The platform is a mixture of bots and people fighting over how many followers they are getting. I tried to find interesting groups actually making things and sharing with each other, but they don't exist IMO. Most said groups are ran by a few "elites" and then the strategy for anyone else is to do the "engagement bro" garbage - posting for the sake of posting - and overall the platform seems dead I'm the ways that matter to me.

For what it's worth most social media is in a doom spiral right now. It's a mixture of technical issues surged by LLMs and social reasons related to the highly polarizing landscape we are in today. I don't have good solutions and I personally am perfectly fine not being involved in this chapter of the book of the Internet, even if it is the final chapter.

This post gives me the same feeling when someone at work tells me how they do CrossFit. You don’t have to signal so hard, just make a decision and do it. Not everything is a moral lesson that has to become some kind of sermon and honestly, that post told me everything I needed to know about where the EFF is. The EFF Punk rock style is dead and long live the complainers.

"The math hasn’t worked out for a while now."

How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.

I am puzzled, not at EFF - this decision seems congruent with their ideals - no, I'm puzzled at the amount of comments on here that care so deeply about them staying on X, so much to garner 1000+ comments! So many people here seem to be taking this move as an offense at themselves. Why do people care so much about a private social media site?

My first thought was that 5-10 posts a day is just too much. Can't expect everyone to read everything and also react to each one.

I don't use social media at all, unless you count HN as such.

I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.

I closed my X account Tuesday evening after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Something just snapped finally and I realized there’s no value in monitoring the situation and all these accounts are just monetizing my energy and attention with no value provided.

The only social media I’m going to keep for now is Reddit and YouTube because I think it’s still a net positive for the educational content, but even those are on the chopping block for me. The whole Internet is being capitalized into junk food, people just push out sensationalized low calorie garbage because they get paid per view. It’s sad to see.

I have a different view: X has been a night and day improvement over the old Twitter.

Community Notes mean that if you see misleading information, it is accompanied by facts. It even uses notifications to show you corrections to something you saw previously.

Free speech is actually encouraged and is flourishing.

Grok is a world class AI tool.

Good. Now leave TikTok and Facebook as well. People who care will find out what you are up to, and people who don't won't see you on social media anyway.

I left Twitter, Facebook, et al about a decade ago. And I can assure you: You will never miss any important development.

The notion that we need to plugged into Twitter, X, whatever, to stay up to date is simply false.

I got my account banned on Tweeter for literally doing nothing. I mainly had it because Twitter requires you to have an account in order to read tweets and occasionally I needed to read a tweet there. A few weeks ago my account got suspended. Oh well.

There’s people still using x?!

closed my Twitter/X account when Elon bought it. I was an early adopter of Twitter and a heavy user prior to that (in consuming if not posting). But it turns out I don't miss it. Freed up time (to read HN, LOL).

This reads like the classic Youtuber whose annoyed their views dropped (this almost always amounts to 'people don't actually like your content as much as you thought').

>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 years ago.

It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.

They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time.

Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.

I wonder if the message of eff doesn’t resonate with the younger generation who did not see the OS wars first hand and instead always saw Microsoft as a cloud provider and Apple and Google as the OS providers.

Community notes has done so much to help obvious and blatantly false information on X. I can't believe that instagram and other platforms haven't implanted it yet.

While I agree with where the EFF is generally coming from, it would make much more sense to just syndicate posts from a libre solution. They could even do adversarial interoperability things. Imagine something akin to a Matrix bridge such that replies on Xitter show up on Masto or some other libre protocol solution, so they (and others) can engage with replies right in the libre ecosystem. Or perhaps every nth of their xits not being the original post verbatim, but rather a link directing people to a web implementation of the libre solution with links to go deeper into that ecosystem. This type of thing would be perfectly in line with the EFF's goals. And not being able to get it together to do even this much is quite sad.

Some context.

Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook.

It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size.

Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate.

Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.

The EFF is getting less engagement because they do not make engaging posts. They make a generic and boring summary and then link off platform. This just is not how X works if you want to go viral. For example:

>A nonprofit web host got a copyright demand—for a photo it didn’t post. They removed it anyway. The law firm still demanded money. EFF pushed back, and the claim fell apart. <link to article>

I can't see how anyone could see this as engaging.

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

They do not explain why it's contradictory. "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too." can just as well apply to X.

> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes

Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok

They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain:

> The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.

None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X.

> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day

I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well.

It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?

I applaud the move. It's also a little disingenuous to talk about moral standings when the third opening sentence is "The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." If the numbers were working out, would they continue to turn a blind eye on the privacy tracking?

So they're still getting a million impressions s month, and that's not interesting Anyway, putting something up on Instagram and then also on X - that's pretty low effort, no? Weird decision...

Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...

Understandable on ideology standpoint. But my take is that numbers are indicating that people stop caring about EFF.

  > We called for:  
  > - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles  
  > - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages  
  > - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability.  

Makes sense. Especially the point 1 and 3 had been long-standing issues for Twitter since before the acquisition, and the situation had worsened since - only except that means to those became successively more adorably braindead.

I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s

Ahh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p

The "de minimis" at the end is a pretty sick burn.

Elon is a grumpy old bastard now. That’s all he is, really.

Their decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out.

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly?

I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets.

I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.

But isn't this capitulation? If you're not there raising your voice, who will? I know it sounds like a hopeless situation, but with consistent activism, I believe things can and will change.

Doesn't X have the things they asked for? end to end message encryption community notes open source algorithm

What about the marginalized people organizing on X? They don't deserve EFF

I have to say the reason EFF gives for completely avoiding any posts on X seems somewhat disingenuous. If they don't see their presence as endorsement, then - it isn't a dichotomy between "incessant tweeting all day every day" and "never tweet anything". In this post they said:

> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions

Who said they need to tweet 5 times a day on average? For important announcements, tweet. Make it, I don't know, a tweet every few days. Even with somewhat reduced exposure, it's still wide exposure; and if you count heads rather than impressions, it's even more significant to be on different platforms.

I have a(n unfounded) suspicion that this may be about the cultural signaling of staying or not staying on twitter.

Oh. That X (not x11). Makes sense

People still on Twitter have the same energy as the last guy at a house party who won’t leave. The lights are on, the host is asleep, and you’re in the kitchen trying to one-up a drunk stranger on Kierkegaard to impress a girl who’s clearly not going home with either of you.

Gross and performative, and I say this as someone who detests X and has never used it... when they were writing this crap they could have instead been writing about the ridiculous operating system user age validation laws.

As we all should. I’m not playing in a billionaire’s toxic propaganda sandbox, neither should you.

I will follow them on linkedin.

Disabling replies on their X post is one hell of a "we support free speech" move. Hats off, guys. if I had not stopped donating to y'all a few years back due to your many other recent idiotic statements, this would have done it for me.

If you seek some other org that still does what it says and fights for speech: https://www.fire.org/

That's fine, but I'm never joining Bluesky. Possibly the most disgusting echo chamber I've ever encountered in social media.

Very nice, Twitter/X feels like one of those things we keep doing out of inertia, like using Axios to download in javascript.

We used to use it back then because it was a pretty open system, you could famously do analysis on Hashtags, it was even a fad in the scientific community to do sentiment analysis on some topics, twitter was like the Drosophila Melanogaster. The tech stack was very public as well and it had that startup vibe to it. Even presidents were registering on the platform due to its neutrality, which made sense back then.

Nowadays the company was acquired, and acquired not by a nameless penny pinching fund, but by a personalist company who might have bought it for personal, not economic reasons. They were involved in the executive power and did a similar kind of personnel cut and regime change. The presidents now use it, but now people use Twitter because presidents are on it, rather than the other way around.

It still has some professionals in it, and it's relaxed and addictive nature allows me to interact with professionals I wouldn't have a chance to on uptight Linkedin. But meh, it's not like sharing a shitpost with a CEO of a cool startup is going to be my ticket to stardom anyway, if anything it's a bad signal "Hey, remember me? I responded to your tweet about AI with a cool factoid while you wiped your ass on the toilet!" who gives a shit.

Hopefully I too will leave twitter some day, some day.

I feel I am grateful that I never used social media even when they were cool and fun, I always thought it’s vanity “farming”, except now it’s some people’s full time jobs in grifting and being edgy just to farm impressions aka money. Social media is ruined because of monetization, it tapped onto the oldest vulnerability in humanity: greed.

you could just post less or use it for major updates.

This tragism and pathos of it is almost comical. A wounded Twitter warrior heavily sitting in his chair, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve of his blood-stained shirt. "I'll keep fighting. Just Not on X", he mutters bravely. The wound being that, apparently, nobody reads his posts anymore.

I mean, seriously, if whatever they posted on Twitter actually helped anyone (I'd be surprised, but what do I know), then obviously they'd want to deliver it through every channel available to as many people as they can. If not, and they just want to show their protest by quitting — well, at least they could have tried to get themselves banned on Twitter and whine about it later everywhere else. But this — it's just pathetic.

What a joke. Eff complains that Musk threw out the previous censors. It's been well documented they were censoring in bad faith. Effectively the Eff wants the bad censors re-installed.

> 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.

Godwin

So uh, could impressions decrease across the board, not only on X. Like, social platforms have peaked years ago and the downward trend is completely organic.

I wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality.

"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.

I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.

More should follow them. That website is a complete cesspool at this point and if you're not noticing it I worry about how it's gonna effect your psychological wellbeing later in life. The internet is bad enough as it is, but that site is at another degree of awful.

Leading out with "The numbers aren't working out" is a bit disingenuous. If they were "working out", would you continue to stay? If the answer is "no", then just remove the numbers talking point in your justification altogether.

Doing short form updates on BlueSky, but that is the worst algorithmic feed I have ever experienced in my life. I gave it some data. I indicated I didn't want to see some posts. The self-selection of the overall audience is overwhelmingly strong. No matter what I do to shape my engagement, all I get is Rachel Maddow in my feed.

The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky.

Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.

Where is the EFF, what have you done with it?

Killed it and made just another shitty "progressive" sockpuppet, like what happened to Amnesty International?

There is stuff conservatives can support, but some shitheads decide they just must make it a "progressives only" club. Hurray for inclusion.

> an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago

Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows.

Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish.

EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.

So fucking dumb

How is X even still a thing. I left a few years ago and didn’t even think I was early. Baffling how EFF has supported a person like Elon Musk for this long and not went all in on Mastodon. ”The math isn’t working out”? Such a cold message. Is this just about an equation? The last I expected to hear from EFF. Maybe from an influencer, but EFF?

This is an organization with such a clear orientation that they belong at @eff@mastodon.social and neither X nor Facebook to me (where they’re apparently staying). Why not mind your brand and presence and avoid those slop networks where few F/OSS oriented folks are present anyway.

Nothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).

My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology.

They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments.

I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.

TL;DR

Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.

At long last. It should be the case with everybody.

Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed

About time. Other platforms may not exactly be aligned with EFF’s goals, but Musk is outright endorsing the far right and neo-fascist parties in America and Europe.

EFF: "We're tired of standing in this cesspit promoting clean water, we're just getting shit on us and more turds. We'll try standing in these other muddy ponds and try to get cleaned up and keep working"

an HN: "Cmon, you gotta stand in the biggest cesspit in the world, how else would you reach so many turds? Maybe you could tailor your clean water message to be less woke?"

EFF: "Our message is not amenable to asking grok to take its clothes off and give it a pacifier"

What's eff?

Thanks, maybe I can suggest posting here the statement in their website instead of the tweet, in order to avoid generating traffic on X

The amount and tone of discourse on this post is blowing my mind a little bit. I appreciate the criticism and concern about EFF's justification (it definitely seems a bit arbitrary) and would be a bit pissed if I was a donor. But X is so clearly an actively hostile, botted, and controlled platform. Does the hn crowd really value X so much? Or is this comment section also getting botted lol.