Thanks For Destroying Twitter, Elon

Update 26 February 2024: Nitter worked again and I got addicted again. Thankfully, Nitter no longer works which means I actually have to work now. Sigh.

While I don’t Tweet much, I’ve wasted months of my life doomscrolling Twitter while logged out, even though I promise myself that I’ll stop. The other day, I woke up ready to waste 3 hours scrolling through hot takes but I couldn’t since it required a login. Search required a login for a while but I didn’t expect tweets to be closed off.

This was the morning so I Googled to see if anyone else had this issue and I only saw a forum talking about it. It’s run by an Aussie so they had a six hour head start before the media cycle picked it up. Eventually they did and it turns out that Elon decided to gate tweets because they were facing a lot of scraping from AI bots. I’d link his tweet but, y’know…

On top of this, he also limited the amount of tweets people could view a day. I agree that web scraping (particularly for AI by fucksticks who can’t do it properly) is cancer, but I’m not sure it makes much business sense, moreso since the new CEO Linda Yaccarino is trying to court back advertisers.

I have a strong dislike for Elon and his fanssimps, but the only way this makes sense if I became an Elon simp. Elon Musk, non-founder of Tesla and Paypal, actual founder of The Boring Company and SpaceX, poly math and real life Tony Stark finds problems with online social media platforms. Run by corrupt and incompetent buffons suppressing free speech, he boldly spent 44 billion dollars to save social media. By firing 80% of his staff (including the one who slept on the floor at the office), overhauling moderation to flood the site with unpleasant shitheads in the name of free speech while being a pussy and caving into to censorship demands when governments ask him to, shredding Chesterton’s fence and failing to be one of the cool kids, he obliterated Twitter’s meager revenue to acheive his goal of making the site unappealing to the laptop class and ivory tower elitists. In doing so, this cured their digital addiction, allowing them to focus on bigger societal problems and increasing the odds that humanity will last forever beyond Elon’s own efforts.

That was incredibly painful to write.

But seriosuly, this latest move shows that Elon doesn’t have sound business accumen, especially since he announced this change before a holiday weekend. Because of this, and the other boneheaded descisions other social media sites are making (looking at you Reddit) these days, you really should look into making your own website with a domain you control. It’s only going to get worse going forward.