Hey, don’t rewrite history - twitter was always notoriously bad, under Elon it surely got even worse though.
I agree with everything except the “got even worse” part. It was always a steaming turd.
It was, but now it’s a steaming turd with Nazis and KKK apologists.
A few Nazis and KKK apologists convinced a shit-ton of marketers, influencers, Karens, and other predatory users to leave.
On balance, Nazis and Klukkers didn’t make it any worse than it was.
They have $44 billion dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
For me, it’s simpler than that: I’m gonna deadname his company as long as he keeps deadnaming his daughter
What’s up with his daughter? Did she decide to switch name because he gave her a stupid one?
She was a boy. Now she’s a girl. Daddy didn’t take it so well.
Ah ty
Read to the tune of Sk8er boi by Avril Lavigne
I mean, it’s not like twitter was ever a beacon of glory, pre-Elon twitter was still twitter
Twitter was a turd. X is a turd marinaded in diarrhea sauce.
Such poetry. It brings a tear to my eye
Ok well maybe a beacon of glory is a bit out there for Twitter, but there was a time where it was actually cool and unique.
Like back in the day where you could interact with it over plain SMS lol
I feel old.
That was only the first year or two at most iirc
At least 4 years. I was using a flip phone until around 2010, and that’s how I normally use Twitter when I wasn’t at a computer.
My poor parents phone bill when I started using Twitter over SMS…
People now have fond memories of twitter? Insane.
Those people sold it to musk. They were tech bros whose goal from the start was to get a massive buyout and bail. They don’t deserve your respect anymore than musk does.
But Twitter has always been shit.
Not really. It was fun to talk to people that you barely knew. It was kinda like a hybrid of a chatroom and a forum.
But it grew to become shit.
The reality is that Xitter isn’t actually any shittier than Twitter was. It’s not any better, of course. But it’s certainly not any worse.
I mean, what you personally call it isn’t really going to make any difference, so if we’re trying to optimize your mental health, just reframe the naritive in your head. You’re still calling it Twitter to honor what it used to be, back when you respected it. You are refusing to acknowledge the nazi dumpster fire it has become, even if you still need to talk about it.
I personally basically never have a reason to mention the site when taking to another person, but if/when I do, I’ll call it Twitter just because I think it would annoy Elon, if he somehow knew.
I personally basically never have a reason to mention the site when taking to another person, but if/when I do, I’ll call it Twitter just because calling it ex was confusing in almost every context.
The way I look at it, if Elon Musk is gonna deadname his own child, I’m sure as shit gonna deadname the corporation he tanked
Eye for an eye makes the world blind
The following is a tremendously disproportionate analogy given that we’re talking about a microblogging website, but I really don’t think there’s any better term for it:
It’s really less like you’re calling Twitter by its deadname and more like you’re refusing to call it by its slave name. Twitter didn’t come up with this on its own, some guy just rolled up and said “I’m changing your name because yours isn’t cool enough.” Like, fukken Kunta Kinte.
Again, very unfortunate that that’s the only comparison that comes to mind but I’m really blanking on anything else. Jean Valjean, I guess. Maybe Darth Vader. Locutus of Borg.
I have despised twitter since basically its inception.
- The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.
While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.
It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.
-
Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.
-
Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.
Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.
The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.
It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.
I am with you on almost all this, but I’m not sure about this:
a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.
Don’t you remember the many-part tweets? Super common and all but admitting how fucking moronic the character limit was. The character limit alone made Twitter a huge piece of shit that I always hated. And I’m with you that it never made anything better. People argued for years that Twitter was good specifically because of that limit. I never understood that argument in the least.
I thought it was quite good once upon a time.
Can we start calling it Bluesky?
Xlon’s Twitter
Don’t call it anything. Ignore it and maybe it will go away.
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
Stylized as 𝕏itter
Nice. 👍
Ummm … how?!? I just copied that text and it worked. 🤯
Because it’s text.
There are more kind of letters then just our latin alphabet. Cyrillic, aboriginal Canadian and even Chinese and Japanese can be typed by just text for instance (日本語の例え)
In the same vein, mathematical and other scientific symbols can be typed using just text, and 𝕏 is the symbol that stands in place for arbitrary distance in a formula.
Basically, it’s just a (mathematical) letter, it can be typed.
That’s also why their new CEO had difficulties copyrighting it; it’s just a letter, after all!As a sidenote, looking up what the mathematical symbol actually means gave me this gem
Even the Wikipedia community refuses to acknowledge this!
It’s a distinct ascii character
It’s not like it was a hostile take over. They played their part when Musk talked shit and they sued him to follow through with the purchase. They could have easily kept it, but they wanted the money instead.
Not that they are blameless - far from it - but they had a fiduciary responsibility to pursue the deal because it was good for their shareholders
That’s not the case at all, though it’s very often believed to be and stated as such on here and Reddit.
“Fiduciary duty to get profit” is a libertarian myth. It has no legal basis.
No, I don’t think that’s true. Twitters board had to sue for specific performance because Musk backed out of a formal offer in the late stages for fabricated reasons. It’s not like it was “sue musk or go to jail” but their job as board members comes with a fiduciary obligation, and musk was paying 38% over the share price. Twitter is FAR from blameless but sueing musk isn’t a failing https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/07/14/twitter-vs-musk-the-complaint/
That’s not what I said. I said the “Fiduciary duty to make profit” that keeps being brought up whenever corpos act like sociopaths, is a myth.
Ok? But that’s not what the Twitter board claimed. I agree with your premise but that isn’t what happened here.
You literally used it as the reason in the comment I replied to
But they literally HAVE a fiduciary obligation. I agree with you that people use that as an excuse for heinous shit, but in this case they had a formal, legally binding offer. Musk was in breach of contract and they sued for specific performance or damages. Musk didn’t want to pay the damages. If they didn’t sue, Twitter would forfeit I think $1bn in damages and their stock would tank. Not suing would open the door for hostile investors to come in, pretend to buy, back out when they wanted to and time the stock movements. I get what you’re saying, but this is a case where if the board didn’t sue then Twitters shareholders pay for it.
You and I may agree that they never should have been in that place to begin with but that’s definitionally a fiduciary obligation
It’s a myth so widely pushed and accepted over the decades that just calling it a myth won’t be accepted as an argument against it at this point.
What I think is interesting is that this sense of fiduciary duty can be used by a company to do whatever they want. Mass layoffs are part of a fiduciary duty to cut costs. Mass hirings are part of a fiduciary duty to expand operations for growth. At this point it’s less a myth and more an excuse for doing whatever.
It was a public company, the shareholders would’ve sued them, no?
Twitter has never, even dating back to it’s inception, never ever ever turned a profit. The whole reason Elon mockingly offered to buy it was because they were looking for, and struggling to find, a buyer. They just wanted to break even and walk away.
Instead Elon was like “Hur dur I got 43 billion for ya!” And Twitter was like “SOLD! No takesies backsies!”. And Elon was like “Wait, wut?”
And then Elon carried a sink through the lobby in protest.
OP might be talking about the user base, not the owners.