Elon Musk has latched onto “unregretted user-minutes”, a metric for Twitter's success that he hasn't defined, after taking issue with mDAUs during his takeover
During the takeover fight, Musk attacked Twitter's long-standing mDAU disclosure as unreliable — even as the company told advertisers it had crossed the quarter-billion mDAU mark. Once in control, he swapped in raw volume claims instead, touting ~8B daily active minutes, up 30% year over year, alongside record signup figures.
The new 'unregretted user-minutes' framing is the latest step in that arc: it keeps minutes at the core but adds an undefined quality filter only Musk can apply. Because the metric has no published definition or audit trail, it converts a previously standardized advertiser-facing number into a founder-curated one.
First-order effects
Advertisers who bought against mDAU reports now have no comparable yardstick — pricing and verification conversations shift to a metric whose definition sits entirely with the owner.
Second-order effects
Without a shared standard, Musk's own claimed figures (2M+ signups/day, ~8B active minutes/day) become the de facto baseline advertisers must either accept on faith or independently measure themselves.
Third-order effects
If owner-defined success metrics become normal at privately held platforms, third-party measurement firms and eventual regulators inherit the burden of establishing comparability that standardized disclosures once provided.
The trend: Social platform owners are replacing standardized, externally reported engagement metrics with self-defined ones that they alone can verify.
waiting for Chamath & the whole All In podcast crowd to peddle this metric followed by the hustler-influencer crowd... https://www.techmeme.com/... An undefined metric from the CEO is the best kind of metric for nothing.
Surveyor: “do you regret what you're doing here?” Guy spending ten hours a day searching hashtags to yell at randos who say anything positive about drag queens, Disney, the homeless, bike lanes, or Meghan Markle: “no” https://twitter.com/...
@Techmeme @timkhiggins So basically Elon is measuring success by how much people *don't* regret using this app. Somehow he invented a metric that positions his platform in an even worse light.
nearly anyone who's ever worked in analytics has had a boss who's asked them to invent a new metric because the old one didn't give them the results they wanted https://twitter.com/...