What Elon Musk does wrong and why I leave Twitter.

Twitter established in 2006 have over its near 20 year history grown to become one of the most used Social Media platforms. Even though they are one of the biggest, they have struggled to make money.

But this all changed about a year ago, when Elon Musk posted publicly about an intent to buy Twitter, resulting in the multi-bilionary taking over the company after some trials determining the value and other stuff. On October 26 2022 Elon Musk carried a sink into the Twitter building as a pun on his takeover.

This marked the beginning of a long series of changes that, for me, have gradually made the platform less appealing to me. Mass unbanning of conspiracists and racists, the commercial sale of blue checkmarks that for a long time had indicated verified celebrity accounts, changes in algorithms, freely selling tweet promotion resulting in a lot of divisive tweets being put into every feed, and flooding of ads.

Ok, Twitter had been running on budget deficites for a long time. Maybe some of these was badly thought through attempts on balancing the books.

In mid May 2023 Linda Yaccarino was announced new CEO of Twitter, a move I think a lot of people welcomed. She had the background and experienced needed to attract announcers, something that would be critical in balancing the books. But in hind sight, I think this might be Yaccarino’s worst carreer move. Why? Based on things Elon Musk said publically during first half of July 2023, it seems Musk have completely ignored anything from Yaccarino and any other advisors, and on July 23 Twitter was rebranded X.

What is so significant with X?

Back in the late ’90’s during the .com bubble, Elon Musk started X.com, an online payment and transaction system, that merged with another similar service and finally was bought by eBay and rebranded to PayPal. This is significant for the rebranding. Back in 2017 Elon Musk bought back the X.com domain name from PayPal for an undisclosed value, for “Sentimental Reasons”. Several of Musk’s public appearances during July 2023 he have talked about how X will take over a large part of the transaction market.

In my opinion, even though maybe convenient, I don’t like the idea of combining all services into one platform. Therefor the rebranding to X and pushing the idea of X moving into payment market is the final twigg on the load for me. After some problems with being locked out, I left Facebook in September 2022, and Messanger shortly after, and with this I will leave Twitter too. I will not deactivate my account, as my Facebook accaount isn’t deactivated either. But since the Twitter app is rebranded X and the bird gone from my mobile, I will delete the X app. At current I will end all current ongoing discussions on Twitter (I stick to that name), and step down. I might still announce articles, streams, and videos, or might not, that I haven’t fully decided yet. But my daily consume of Twitter ends today.

What does Twitter give up on the rebranding?

During the time from Twitter went public up until today, there have been many popular-culture references to it. Many comics use the bird in a speach buble or similar to indicate messages on the mobiles of persons, many games have references to the bird, and even some movies pun around the bird.

Disney’s Moana has this imortal reference “We use the bird to write with. It’s called tweeting”. This reference would be completely meaningless with X.

Cities: Skyline from Collosal Order use the bird Chirp to “tweet” messages from the citizens. Pre-release videos for the follow up game, Cities: Skyline II seems like the use of Chirp is even more fleshed out.

These was just two quick references to Twitter in popular culture, and I don’t see how X will be able to capitalize on that kind in the future.

Now that I actively scale back my presence on Social Media, I hope I can become more productive again instead of just procrastrianate. Rather than miss my presence on SoMe, look forward to more articles and videos. Maybe this one, with a small Chirp, can be of interest?