Bizarro Twitter
RIP Twitter bird, ‘X’ gon’ give it to ya…
I think at this point we have to assume that Elon Musk is intentionally trying to run Twitter into the ground. Perhaps partially for the LOLs, but potentially to push the company towards bankruptcy and a resolution of the debt crisis the company is soon to face. Or maybe to just be able to buy the debt on the cheap. Or something. Who knows and who cares.
Twitter, as we knew it, is dead.
The final absurd nail in the insanity coffin seems imminent, with Musk saying he’s officially going to change the name of Twitter to ‘X’. Because it’s his favorite letter. And soon all the iconic bird iconography will be pushed out of the nest in favor of some super masculine and undoubtedly mildly tacky and likely brutal ‘X’ branding. Twitter, for all its faults — and there have been many over the years — was beloved by the media both niche and mass to the tune of free marketing and usage that no amount of money could buy. That’s all flying out the window now. For what? Some grander vision of a “super app” that will never work. Or something. Again, who knows.
The fall of Twitter as not only a fun product but just as a usable product has been severe. At first, I was fully on board with the algorithmic “For You” tab. It was something Twitter probably should have done long ago to help scale beyond the hardcore base (whilst maintaining the “Following” tab option for such users). But “For You” has since become a cesspool of cheap memes and shitty ads injected every third tweet. And more recently, every single refresh leads to at least one, if not multiple, tweets by Elon Musk at the top of that feed.¹ It’s trolling, but it’s not funny. Twitter used to be an information network. Perhaps the best one ever created, which the company stumbled into. Now you can’t read anything on the network without needing to do more work to fact check both the information and often the entity tweeting it. The blue check mark switch-a-roo will go down as one of the dumbest product moves in the history of the internet.
All of this sucks. I loved Twitter. But the bird is dead. In its place is some weird, spiraling viral network where the content pushed to you has no unifying principle beyond maybe just having the opposite ideological bent of the content that proliferated before it. This is basically Bizzaro Twitter. It’s so fucking weird. It’s like a literal version of the scene in The Dark Knight where The Joker lights the massive pile of money on fire and walks away. Except that amount of money clearly wasn’t $45 billion. This is.
I don’t know Elon Musk. I have nothing against Elon Musk. I previously found him very inspirational for everything he’s done with both Tesla and SpaceX. How could you not? That makes all of this all the more insane and disappointing.² He’s ruining a product that many of us not only loved, but was our most-used service. Maybe it wasn’t a sustainable business — but it had also sustained itself for the past 15+ years prior to this, including the past decade as a public company.³ Twitter would have been fine. But now Twitter is no more.⁴ Seemingly randomly.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.⁵
¹ To be clear, I don’t follow Elon Musk, nor do I “engage” with his tweets (though he does engage with mine every once in a while, which is a wild experience). There are many other tweets I do engage with, but those are not elevated beyond the Elon tweets.
² There’s some sort of headline here along the lines of “Never Tweet Your Heroes” that I’ve been sitting on for years, but could never quite get there…
³ Seriously, we’re about to hit the 10 year anniversary of Twitter going public in a few months.
⁴ Thank god for Threads, I guess? We’ll see?
⁵ “And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.”
