Regarding Twitter

You’ve all read long-form posts and threads about Elon Musk’s takeover of and subsequent failures with Twitter, so I’d rather keep this relatively short.

Twitter blew up as a unique and extremely simple microblogging site, its lightweight and casual approach made it a great tool for keeping up with friends and sharing things on a whim. But the thing which propelled Twitter to astronomical heights was the adoption of it by institutions and organisations.

Government departments, news outlets, companies, brands and their associate support teams, museums, charities. That only scratches the surface but such institutions suddenly had an accessible public face to interact with the public. No longer did you have to scour through website pages to find anything new, you just hopped on Twitter, found the verified group you were looking for, and everything was just there.

Looking on, eyes bulging with imagined riches, lied Elon Musk. How prestigious would it be to control a ~400 million user strong platform which world governments flock to. And with no consideration for responsibility or user safety he went ahead with buying it, tried getting out of buying it, and has since started running it to the ground.

But the worst part of all of this?

There was seemingly no oversight.

There was no-one to level with or rein back the new CEO, no continuation plan, the website, service, and most importantly the staff in the company are held hostage to the whims of an impressionable manbaby who won’t take no as an answer. The omnishambles surrounding the removal of the legacy verification tick and introducing the $8/mo Twitter Blue tick is the epitome of his management – with Musk only going back on aspects of it when the rapid wave of impersonation damaged him.

Musk’s entire endeavour wasn’t about improving the platform, or incorporating it into his idea of an “everything app”. Really, this was all in the name of vanity; the world’s richest man wanting to hoard a platform’s success all to himself, to be adored for it. You see it in how he only seems to respond to the Blue Tickers (when not tacitly endorsing limiting democratic rights).

In the offline world, your favourite teenage hangout spot could randomly be removed from you and blocked off, and online we see the same happening (a cold but necessary reminder that things don’t last forever). It’s a bit mopey when it’s some faceless corporate monolith taking that spot and ruining it, but there’s something worse knowing that any driven individual with more money & ego than sense could snatch it up a moment’s notice.