Twitter has captured the hearts of foreign internet users from the very beginning of its existence. But not my heart, in 2007 I was only 5 years old, back then I didn’t even have a computer. In 2015, however, I first tried to sign up a Twitter account. Back then, all I could think about was World of Tanks Blitz and Tiësto. In fact, that was the only accounts I was followed to, and I didn’t post any content at that time.
As time passed, my interests changed, and gradually I formed an opinion about the platform. In 2018 I saw Twitter as a place for fans of political movements. And I don’t like politics. So I avoided this platform. In 2019, however, I loved A Hat in Time. So, I pretty quickly followed the game account, developers and active community members. However, I still wasn’t an active Twitter user, and my opinion of the platform hadn’t changed much.
2021, my focus shifts from AHiT to TETR.IO. I’m purging the contents of my account and starting to get involved in the community. This time I stopped paying attention to politics and I even started posting “tweets.” I found the concept of microblogging quite interesting in itself. However, the “For You” tab still offered content that I didn’t really want to see, but whatever.
However, before the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, I could not even think that the platform could become worse than it was. My opinion of Musk at the time of 2022 was that he was a meme man, launching rockets into space while returning the first stages of rockets and the owner of a major company that makes electric cars. And yes, I believe he has rolled away.
The promises
In March 2022, Elon Musk published a tweet, where he polled users, is Twitter adhered to a principle “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy”. 70% of the 2 million people who voted answered “No”. After that, he began to criticize Twitter.
Elon claimed that Twitter was not respecting the principles of free speech, and that it was necessary to open the source code of the recommendation algorithms. At the beginning of April, he announces that he is buying a 9% stake in the company. He is then offered to join the company’s board of directors. He agrees, but later reverses that decision.
A little later, Elon offers to buy Twitter outright for $43 billion and turn it into a private company. Not everyone liked that. It turned out that some of the money he was offering was credit. Elon went on to say that Twitter should become “a global platform with freedom of speech beyond the control of states” (Not exactly like that but you got it).
Let’s move on to the moment when the board finally accepted the proposal (end of April 2022). Immediately afterwards, he declared his intentions: to make the recommendation algorithm open and transparent, and to rid the platform of spambots by verifying the authenticity of people. Elon called an authenticity verification that “check mark”, that confirmed, that the well-known account was run by its owner, so that it could be recognized from parody accounts.
The reality
Okay, let’s think about how Elon solved the bot problem. Did he set up a captcha? No. Did he come up with a clever bot recognition system based on neural networks? No.
He launched a Twitter Blue subscription for $8 a month, saying it would destroy bots, because subscribers would get priority in search results, replies, mentions. They also get that very check mark.
It not only didn’t work at all, but anyone could impersonate anyone for just $8. I was testing Twitter under Elon Musk for spam bots and this is what came out:
And at the time of publication I got 17 replies of similar content. And that’s just the beginning.
On February 2, 2023 Twitter announced that it was going to stop free access to its own API and was going to do it on February 9 the same year. This was unpleasant news for many bot owners, but Elon promised that free access to the API will remain for those bots that provide good content.
And then the worst began to happen: He started hiding platform features behind the paywall. The “edit” button was precisely the first feature that only Twitter Blue subscribers had access to. And this button apparently allowed you to edit the content of an already published tweet. However, only for 30 minutes after the tweet was published, the editing history is saved and available to everyone.
Next, subscribers have the ability to put NFT on their avatar. Lol let’s just be happy for the money wasters and move on.
Then subscribers were allowed to post tweets up to 10,000 characters long. The whole point of microblogging was flushed down the toilet.
And now for the funniest part: when Elon discovered that his subscription did not solve the bot problem, he decided… to limit the number of API accesses. Thus, new users could read only 300 tweets a day, old users could read 600 and verified users up to 6 thousand. Twitter turned into a useless garbage dump that constantly returns 429. A little later Elon realized the mistake and… just raised the limits.
And last one thing: Twitter has a special client called Tweetdeck. This client allows you to work with the social network through a multi-column interface. And those columns could contain someone’s profile, list, home feed, or search results. It was also possible to monitor users activity and, most importantly, to share an account without sharing a password.
When Elon took over Twitter, they started coming up with a new version of Tweetdeck. Relatively recently, they published a new version, but left the option to use the Tweetdeck legacy. And when Elon applied API restrictions, the Tweetdeck legacy quietly bypassed them. But unfortunately, Elon broke the Tweetdeck legacy, and only subscribers will have access to the new version.
The Consequences
Almost immediately after Musk took office, tens of thousands of users joined the servers of Mastodon, which is part of Fediverse — a decentralized association of social networks that are mostly based on free and open software. And though they’ve been back from time to time, recent events have finally convinced me that Twitter is over.
There’s also Mark Zuckerberg on the horizon, who is about to launch his Twitter counterpart, Threads. Threads is scheduled to launch on July 6. Naturally, many users are concerned about their privacy and are not going to use the platform.
Yes, and on all his Twitter activity Musk has lost a fortune. Why is he doing this? It’s unclear. The only thing that is clear is that he treated Twitter like a toy.
What to do?
Switch to free social networking analogues. For example, to switch to Mastodon, you can start from this page. You simply choose a server and create your account there. After that, you can communicate with the rest of Fediverse without leaving your server.
There are also free analogues of other social networks. For YouTube it’s PeerTube, for Reddit — Lemmy, for VK — OpenVK (Not a member of Fediverse). (lol) The conclusion
As soon, as 4-block stacking community moves to Fediverse, my Twitter account will become useless for me. Elon has managed to turn the dump into an even bigger dump, causing the platform to lose advertisers, employees, and most importantly, money.
Will Twitter make it out of this crap? I hope not. Will Fediverse rise in popularity? I hope so. Tell me what you think under the social media post that links to this post.