not content to simply let the site die, elon musk is creating chaos to stay relevant.

april fools’ day is always a great day to shake up a paradigm, especially one that relates to identity verification. yesterday, april 1, was supposedly the last day legacy verified twitter users would have their blue check.

originally this small icon signified a journalist, publication, or whatever notable entity were who they claimed to be. naturally, there was some cache and status associated with it.

now that elon is trying to make money off this aspect of his latest purchase, many media figures are publicly announcing they have no interest in giving this man $8 a month. the new york times is one of them.

elon went ahead and removed their verification immediately. this is petty as fuck, but it got people talking and that’s all that matters to him anyway.

right now, instead of removal, there’s actually been a strange equalizing of blue checks. all with the same vague description:

i had about two hundred words written yesterday, before elon made yet another baffling change: it’s doge twitter now.

people are speculating that it’s to distract from some crypto lawsuit nonsense ^[1]elon’s lawyers claim dogecoin “is legit” or maybe a poorly timed april fool’s, since who is even at the company to make these changes on time anymore?

all this idiocy is in service of one thing: elon’s ego. attention is the important part, so it does not matter how much chaos he causes running his business via twitter poll, or backpedaling about who has to pay to keep their checkmark. while journalists and artists fret over their dwindling engagement with their work, elon will keep posting memes from ten years ago.

hey, at least twitter finally released that source code they’ve been promising! elon wanted us to lower our expectations, perhaps because some of their metrics are extremely smooth-brained.

when your company’s algorithm specifically has a carve-out for your tweets, you can basically do anything you want. it is very frustrating to watch the site break in new and different ways. for a while today, retweet information was completely removed, so all you saw was a random tweet in your feed with no context.

i won’t get into specifics about the algo, other than to say it’s tough out there for indie artists and small accounts.

i hate that i spend so much time thinking about a site that is bringing less and less joy and fulfillment to use. but i feel i’ve committed myself to watching it go. twitter’s been my internet home base for too long to simply cut myself off now.

i am on this sinking ship until i can no longer log in. all i really have is documenting the slow rotting of twitter, spearheaded by a divorced troll who is happy to get whatever headlines if it moves a stocks percentage up a point.

eventually, the ways to fuck with this site will dry up. chaos will stop making news when people finally get bored of elon’s pre-teen antics. those “power users” will all flock to instagram, mastodon, or whatever. the elon suckups, cryptobros and scam artists will be all that’s left of twitter. for now, it struggles to hold onto the unique relevance it has with regards to breaking news and real-time events.

nothing has replaced twitter. no other social media has been able to replicate twitter’s atmosphere, and it’s prob past time to accept that an era is over. whatever social media ascends after this, we will never have the community and access twitter once granted us.

like any death, this is hard to accept. i will continue to try (tumblr’s been kinda fun lately!) but my internet home base might end up being a podcast discord.

we don’t necessarily get to choose the internet ecosystem we spend time in. these spaces live or die by the mutuals you find, the content you get to see, the interactions you have. each day, elon is making twitter a worse place. there will not be a comeback, unless he actually steps away. ^[2]and stops fucking posting but even then, it may be too late. twitter may have rotted beyond redemption. perhaps we should leave it to the cryptobros and scammers to feed off, like carrion beetles and flies binging on a dead body.

i’m gonna go think about something else for now! but just know, i am thinking about twitter Too Much.