What the heck is happening with Twitter?
Twitter used to be one of my favorite social media platforms. It was a great online pulse of what was going on. Did something important happen? Twitter usually had it first. Sometimes they got it wrong but most of the time they had it first. Reporters would give a heads up to a story in the works, or someone who was on the scene would tweet.
Sometimes the news media deems a story not important, that people on Twitter find important. Twitter would call my attention to those. I first read about the derailment in Ohio on Twitter.
I never used Twitter as a definitive source, but rather as a possible indicator of topics I might want to learn more about.
Twitter was never a great success. It had at most like 450 million users while Facebook has 2.9 billion. And it was not a money maker.
Elon Musk recently bought twitter for $44 million. Some think he shot off his mouth and didn’t really want to buy it, but then could not get out of the deal. Anyway, he’s making a mess of things many believe. He’s laid off a lot of workers, without regard to what their contribution was in many cases it seems. The layoffs started immediately before any planning could have been done. Critical things are not getting done. Like paying rent on their San Francisco office space for one.
Twitter does not run as smoothly as it did. External applications have been shut out of Twitter. Prominent users could once have their Identity verified. That was a benefit to normal users as well as the verified users. We knew we were interacting with a celebrity or leader, and not someone impersonating them. Now, anyone who pays $8 a month can have the verified Blue checkmark by their name.
Twitter says of their new policy :
As a result of this change, Twitter will no longer be accepting applications for the blue Verification checkmarks under the previous criteria (active, notable, and authentic).
And most recently Musk was offended that President Biden’s tweets were being read by more people than his own. His solution was not to try and be more engaging, but rather to have his engineers pause making customer features and instead redesign Twitter to showcase his own tweets. People who do not follow Musk, are now finding tweets in their feed.
Twitter has become a much less reliable means of getting a heartbeat of the world. I hope it finds its way back, or to a better place.
Many Twitter users have fled to other platforms like the open-source Mastodon. Mastodon has no central servers so no Musk can come along and dampen its effectiveness theoretically. More about that in a future post.