kgraves on Hacker News

Ask HN: Why isn't Twitter / X dead yet?

I thought with Elon's reckless actions that X should have been dead by now.

During the time that X was acquired by Elon:

Pebble / T2 (X competitor) shut down. (1)

Artifact (Another X competitor) shut down. (2)

Post.news is drastically losing traction with it's founder struggling to "kill X". (3)

Threads is faltering and lost over 75% of their daily active users since launch. (4) (5)

Spill is in invite limbo and many people lost interest.

Substack's competitor Notes didn't take off and people are moving away from the platform. (6)

Mastodon is still very hostile to non-tech folks, made no dent to X in user traction and still has major UX & discovery issues. (7)

Hive was a flash in the pan, turned off their servers and fell off with no roadmap. (8)

BlueSky is still stuck in invite limbo with no traction.

Clubhouse and Nostr aren't even on the map here.

All the while X is doing all the worst things possible to destroy their own platform, yet it is still up and running somehow and the X competitors imploded in the process.

If any other platform did what Elon has done they would have been dead a long time ago.

Why is Twitter / X not dead after all these months even when it is valued much less than what Elon purchased it for?

(1) https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/pebble-the-twitter-alternative-previously-known-as-t2-is-closing-down/

(2) https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/instagram-co-founders-news-aggregation-startup-artifact-to-shut-down/

(3) https://themessenger.com/tech/why-is-it-so-damn-hard-to-kill-twitter

(4) https://fortune.com/2023/08/04/threads-traffic-spiral-down-82-percent-launch-month-mark-zuckerberg/

(5) https://www.businessinsider.com/threads-meta-app-decrease-daily-active-users-mark-zuckerberg-2023/

(6) https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/

(7) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/18/mastodon-users-twitter-elon-musk-social-media

(8) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/hive-social-turns-off-servers-after-researchers-warn-hackers-can-access-all-data/

14kgraves2y ago18

Ask HN: $1M-$10M ARR companies with low head count?

Are there any companies out there that are making more than $1M ARR with an extremely low head count and is at least profitable?

Perhaps it's too boring to be profitable and instead do a loss making speedrun. (e.g. raise money from VCs, hype the raise on TechCrunch, burn the money entirely on hiring too much and layoff employees down the line, rinse and repeat) à la Fast, Coinbase, etc.