The website formerly known as Twitter
Conn Carroll
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It’s not every day that a for-profit enterprise takes a billion-dollar brand, a brand so culturally significant it has become a verb in most dictionaries, and just lights it on fire.
But Elon Musk is not your everyday billionaire and Twitter was his toy to dispose of as he pleases.
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To be clear, I’m not anti-Elon. I’m largely ambivalent about him. SpaceX is cool. PayPal was useful like 10 years ago. But I don’t trust electric vehicles, Tesla is far too dependent on government subsidies, and Musk is far too cozy with the Chinese Communist Party.
So in total, when Elon purchased Twitter last year, my reaction was, “Meh.”
Since then, however, I do feel like Musk has treated Twitter like his personal plaything, making major policy changes with what appears to be little forethought, often alienating users for no other reason than spite.
Twitter’s traffic and ad revenue have been falling as Musk’s erratic ownership continues, and whatever hope there was that new CEO Linda Yaccarino would be a stabilizing force was quashed when Yaccarino helped roll out the rebranding of the website to a certain letter of the alphabet.
I’m not going to bother naming the letter, as it doesn’t really matter. It’s not distinctive. The new name isn’t going to catch on. The site will always be “the website formerly known as Twitter” to me.
That said, I’m not as down on the Elon era as most people. I haven’t noticed any huge upswing in bot accounts or hateful messages. If anything, for me, the hate has gone down, but that may just be because as a conservative there are a lot less angry liberals on the site waiting to pounce on conservative commentators.
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I still spend way too much time on Twitter and will probably continue to do so. I can’t remember the last time some non-sporting news event broke that I didn’t first learn about it on Twitter. It’s also still a good way to keep in touch with old friends and professional acquaintances. Nothing comes close to its reach yet. There is a reason competitors such as Mastodon and Threads keep failing.
But there is no denying that the site is not what it used to be and it appears to be getting worse. I do hope Musk and Yaccarino succeed in turning the website formerly known as Twitter into the “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities” they want it to be. That sounds fun. They just need to come up with a better name first.