What's that stench?! It's Elon Musk

I like Twitter. I mean, sure, it's problematic; lots of people use it to be nasty and there has never been a proper solution to how to moderate it as a whole. But it's been a useful tool for promotion and for connecting with people who share interests and for, you know, screaming into the void when you just have to vent about Rand Paul or whatever.

That was Twitter in the Before Elon era. Here in the Elon Reign era of Twitter, well, it's not so great. Mostly because it's now far, far more permissive of misinformation than it was, and it wasn't great about that before. Plus, it's chaos now. Elon Musk is like mini-Trump here, it's much like the John Mulaney bit about a horse in a hospital. It's just a social media platform, not the entire country and effects on the world, but the metaphor still works. Elon took it over with no idea how it functions and wants to monetize things with no idea what the purpose of the thing is; he went and fired people who, you know, make the thing run; he's alienated pretty much everyone who works there; and his great accomplishment to this point has been to do away with the function that lets people know that a public figure on the platform is actually who they say they are and not someone impersonating them to make trouble. Because reasons.

So people are fleeing Twitter, and I get it. Elon is a dirtbag of, if not the highest order, then a lofty order. I'm sticking around, at least for now, though I'm not checking it nearly as often. It's still useful to me. Sort of. I think. Less so now that it isn't baseball season—it's good for ranting about bad managerial decisions in the moment and arguing the merits or lack thereof of a lineup choice or sharing quips about Commissioner Manfred's bad idea du jour.

Anyway, mostly I'm just curious now. I'm a rubbernecker at a car accident. Will it implode? Will Elon find himself with no staff and the thing turns into a runaway train of some kind? Will the only advertisers left be grifters trying to sell cryptocurrency or NFTs? What level of insanity will the buyer's remorse from this rash impulse purchase drive Elon to? And will that be entertaining?

It's not like Facebook. Facebook is frustrating for other reasons, such as the way so many people use it as their access point to the Internet at large and ignore other means of surfing the web despite the fact that it has turned into a fairly useless platform, what with its constantly changing algorithms turning my feed into a random hodgepodge of unrelated gunk that was posted days or weeks back with no rhyme or reason to it. It's a rarity when something I'm actually interested in shows up near the top of the feed. I haven't used that platform for anything but promoting posts on my website(s) and the very occasional comment on that rare interesting post it shows me. We'd be better off if Facebook disappeared tomorrow.

Twitter is somehow simpler, less overwhelming of the Internet, much more controllable.

At least, it was. We'll see how it evolves from here.

Tagged The Internet   |   Posted on November 19, 2022 at 8:29pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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