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(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
I think the name change is silly and the Twitter brand is very big and valuable as to drop it. Nonetheless, as a lurker on Twitter, I don't understand the arguments for "everything is worse" or "musk is ruining Twitter". All I can see is more features and improved functionality in a sort time. Video uploads, long text, subscription for money, encrypted dms?, Group conversations/streaming. A lot of new stuff.
Maybe some real users of Twitter can tell me how is it worse, but everything seems tribal hate. I even heard journalists say "now anyone can buy the blue check" as in pure garbage functionality. In that case is status loss.
Concrete ways twitter has gotten worse recently, for me:
1) Blue reply boosting. It's less a "boost" and more that all blue replies are prioritized over all non-blue replies, no matter the quality. Together with twitter blue being a class marker for 'median-iq crypto conservative', this makes replies to large tweets uniformly garbage, for no reason whatsoever. This is the biggest one. It's basically just burning the commons for profit.
2) Blocking logged-out browsing. This is just incredibly inconvenient, and also a big one. I think this is related to elon's strange ideas around bots stealing data for AI or something. I strongly suspect it's not stopping scraping.
3) Spam: Spam has gotten a bit worse. Not that much worse, though.
4) Ads are incredibly obnoxious when on a platform without ublock (which isn't that common for me, but I imagine it is for others), and blue doesn't even remove them all...
5) not personally, but DM limit gated by blue. Doesn't actually bother me, but it does for many. Incredibly strange choice.
Concrete ways it's improved, for me:
1) Less strict moderation. It's not more competent, the % of bans that are unjustified has if anything increased, but I can gawk at all sorts of creatures I couldn't a year ago. This is quite nice!
video uploads, long text, encrypted dms, streamings ... I just don't use these at all
The combination of 1 and 2 makes it net negative for me.
Totally fair, thanks for the reply. I've only lurked Twitter and lately I've been following the with_replys of Musk.
Why do you suspect the rate limiting didn't stop the scraping? Also why would it be strange to think that bots scrap data for ai training.
The blocking logged-out browsing also think is bad user experience, but the argument to stop the scraping along the rate limit seems coherent. Always suffered the "Log in to continue browsing" pop up as a lurker and it's really annoying.
I mean, nitter still works, which means logged-out scraping is still possible. Even without that, because scrapers are determined and can just pretend to be real users, and because of how dumb musk's recent ratelimit change was.
That is happening, I was referring to Elon's many incorrect claims about bot AI scraping in the past and his bizzare attempts to combat it.
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I think most of the narrative for "Musk is ruining Twitter" is actually "Musk is allowing people that we hate back on Twitter". For some people - especially in the Blue Tribe - Twitter used to feel like a "safe space", run by friendly tribesmen and allowing them to get the respect they deserve (blue checks, etc.). Now Musk came and he's not their tribesman, the space is no longer safe, the blue checks are available to all kinds of plebeians and in short, the whole thing is ruined. I personally can't really sympathize and don't have an opinion on whether there's a kernel of truth in it or not - I have deleted my twitter account years ago once I figured out it doesn't allow to do anything I want to do, and using it just pisses me off.
I would not be surprised if the new BlueSky app stays in invite-only mode for precisely this reason. A private Twitter probably has more appeal/value to the blue media class than a public Twitter at this point. Like a super-powered Journolist.
Perhaps but then you run into the same failure mode ad Google+, which was a functionally great social media platform with a lot of good ideas and was very hot when it first launched. The invite only character made it exclusive and exciting...for a few months when everyone realized that the appeal of social media is having that un-gated garden of millions of other people to potentially interact with. Interest and use dried up as suddenly as it came and the rest is history.
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Confirming that this is not a strawman; I've heard someone complain about this precise issue IRL.
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That's completely untrue. Thanks to the megablock 'nuke' feature built on the request by Mike Solana, you can find a particularly retarded tweet and then block everyone who liked it.
E.g. this way even people who were being hunted by the deformed NAFO trolls for daring to disagree on the glorious eastern crusade against the subhuman vatniks could lower the risk of brigade mass reporting to essentially zero.
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Same thing with reddit really. The laptop class managed to push out all the right leaning mega subs and now its 'theirs'. Only the barest figleaf of political neutrality is given and only milktoast conservatives are allowed to come into the town square. (There's still a few wild far right 'cabin in the woods' style subs like /r/cwr still around)
Yes, Reddit has been left-leaning for a long while, but because of subreddits, for a while the red tribe had been allowed to exist in their own bubbles. But it could not last and it didn't. Now it's probably the leftest of the social media platforms (at least if we take the major ones). Even not explicitly political subs - like local ones - are insufferably woke. But still there's some quality content in some subs. On Twitter, I can't really find many redeeming features.
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People have seemingly shortish memories as to what Twitter was before.
Users would request seemingly simple features for months or years, and eventually get the literal opposite of what they were asking for.
It would go down on a regular basis, and seemed to have NO CLUE how to monetize the userbase.
There was that massive breach where huge accounts got exploited for a crypto scam.
Like, how can one pretend that the site before was a paragon of stability, usability, or security compared to now?
Nothing of that magnitude has occurred since the takeover.
The site clearly, CLEARLY never needed staffing at the level it had. So long as Musk doesn't break the core feature of short-form messages in easy-to-follow threads it isn't going anywhere in the near term.
And let me be clear, I say this as someone who would much prefer Twitter (and insta, and reddit, and quite a few other sites) died a quick death and have for a long time.
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