Elon Musk is part of the problem. I don't use or support X anymore than I did twitter
why do so many dems use X? I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to want to read an article here on DU, only to click on article and find, X!
= new reply since forum marked as read
There are many services whose value depends largely on their market share. Email, SMS, and the postal system are universally accepted because they are universal. None of them likely would get out of the gate if they were invented new today.
Now, yeah, Musk sucks. Twitter was the dominant player in its space when he bought them. And solely because of that, they remain the dominant player now. There is tremendous inertia in that network effect.
they find on X, have wondered if it's a Elon bot promoting themselves. 
Stopped opening her posts. 
If you don't want to see DU posts that link to X, watch for the blue square before you click on the post.
indicates a Tweet post.
indicates a Youtube post.
... and a lot of other features like no ads.
Details here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/star
Ty for posting this!
people, among thousands of others from every spectrum of social interests, to reach a wide enough audience to essentially exist either from Twitter generated revenue, or by giving them the ability to easily link to either their blogs, utube channels or actual websites, etc. that would generate small dollar revenue by simply "texting". You need to generate a lot of traffic to your blog/website or utube (who have now slashed across the board revenue for creators) to at least make a meager living at it.
While I never used it (I dumped social media at the turn of this century for the most part) I think it served a fairly free, safe and open space for the exchange of ideas via a simple text style platform. Like anything else (from the first carved stone spear tips to tech today) the allure of mass amounts of wealth consumed and monopolized it. I remember the huge outrage when the rumor mill started that it was going to go public even before Eloon showed interest, which made it worse.
Twitter had become the driver for 10's of thousands to make some kind of living on their own, from really serious people to the moronic, a virtual Alice's Restaurant if you will. But because this "public" square was owned by a private company (even though their product was technically free) that's where the problem lay and the owners of the company decided to cash out. This has always been one of the reasons I personally don't use, or rely as little as possible, on social media. The rug can be ripped out from under you in the blink of an eye and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
The Twitter space had become so large that when eloon bought it (I believe for the technical infrastructure to support his Starlink system more than for what it was) and turned it into an echo chamber for his ego, to this day there are still people who need it either to still try and drive revenue or just simply because it's easy.
I remember Mark Cuban's response when asked about eloon buying it. He said "look, he's got the money, it's a private company, if he wants it, he can buy it and do legally whatever he wants with it, eve shut it off the day he buys it. Its the risk you take when dealing with private entities". Besides, the number of hits generated from this message board to his platform are a miniscule drop in the xitter bucket. He ain't getting richer off of us. Just my 2 cents 
For example, one List is all the news sources I trust, so I can easily see & scroll through the latest headlines. Another List is for legal matters, folks who follow & report on court cases, plus attorneys & law professors etc I like. Another is all pollsters & poll analysts so I can easily see the latest political polling every day.
By using Lists & only viewing my Lists I don't have to wade through all the random right-wing garbage.
Also, advertisers pay per engagement. Viewing & responding to their ad (making a comment) only costs them a few cents, but clicking on a video or web link costs them around 25 cents to 50 cents. So every time I see a right wing ad I click the link 20-30 times at least, so I'm wasting their money & reducing their exposure. Most have an ad budget, the total they'll pay for engagements, so if I use up 30 engagements worth of their budget their ad will show less times & reach less people. By now I've cost official GOP accounts hundreds of dollars & sabotaged thousands of ad exposures.
One added benefit of doing this is that some accounts apparently figured out what I was doing (heck, I would leave comments & tell them "I'm engaging to cost you $$$, now I'm going to click your link 30 times." & I stopped seeing their ads. So, it's a good way to cleanse your ad feed & make the right wingers pay for it.
If enough Democrats did that, then every time a right wing organization ran an ad we could use up their ad budget on the first day & shut down their advertising. Some (many?) of those advertisers might question the value of giving their money to Musk for ads that were producing no results, which could help cut off one of the main income sources for Twitter/Musk. Twitter's income is already abysmal (down 85% since Musk bought it) & there are reports that soon Musk is going to have to sell a bunch of Tesla stock to prop up Twitter (taking money out of his own pocket), which will drive down the value of Tesla stock.
So, if enough Democrats got together on Twitter we could waste the money of right wing advertisers & sabotage their ad campaigns, reduce Twitter's ad revenue, pushing them closer to bankruptcy, & force Musk to use more of his own money (Tesla stock) to prop it up, driving down the value of Tesla stock. But why would Democrats be on Twitter?
