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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.
My headcanon has always been that he's destroying Twitter on purpose as a favor to humanity. So far everything tracks. Shine on you crazy diamond.
I dearly hope you're right. Twitter has been the worst thing that's happened to the political discourse in Finland by a large margin. I've said for years that politicians and journalists should have been forbidden from writing, reading or discussing anything on Twitter or seen there with the threat of a heavy fine or jail sentence.
Facebook is equally bad or worse, and it has been (sensibly) argued that any publicly accessible or accountable forum as such is a detriment to politics.
[before replying, please read the linked post , the excerpt does not explain the reasoning sufficiently well.]
Excerpts:
Facebook has effectively zero effect on the political discourse in Finland now that Covid is just another flu (it had a very small effect as a breeding ground for fringe groups but their actual effect was minimal). As for what effect Facebook has on that side of the pond, I simply don't care.
I don't believe that. Do the major political figures not use Facebook, or are their Facebook pages dead with little interaction ?
Politicians' FB pages are used more or less exclusively for preaching to the choir - that is, people who would vote for them anyway. Almost nothing on them enters the wider discourse in any meaningful way. Meanwhile most journalists and far too many politicians are constantly importing stupid ideas from US Twitter or reporting what this or that person posted on Twitter (to the extent that US domestic politics are given more space in papers than the rest of EU combined).
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