The Current State of Twitter Is So Much Worse Than You Realize
Elon Musk's Attempt to Ruin My Favorite Website May Be His Most Successful Venture Yet
Shithead Disclosure: I will be the first to admit - when Elon first purchased Twitter a couple years ago, I was one of the people who held out hope that his signature dishonesty and laziness would take hold and the site would remain mostly unchanged (save a few cosmetic tweaks). And for the first couple of months, it seemed like maybe this would actually be the case - Elon fired some people, he changed the name, but beyond that there was little about the site that felt markedly different than it had under the previous ownership. But we are several years into this era, and what was once my most favorite website in the whole world is now a fucking awful, ratshit no-good place to be. For many of you coming to this article from Bluesky or elsewhere, you may have been off Twitter for some time now - I want to assure you that you made a really solid decision, and to share with you how deeply broken and shitty “The Everything App” actually is these days.
Elon’s projects over the past decade or so have been marked - almost exclusively - by how far from his promises the final product ends up being. The hyper-futuristic high speed rail system connecting all of California eventually became a small concrete tube that covers a couple blocks of Las Vegas, and instead of concept-style anime trains it’s just some explosion-prone SUVs he couldn’t sell. The Cybertruck arrived years behind schedule, costs 2-3x more than Elon originally claimed, and generally sucks in every possible way a functional truck could suck. Even with “X”, his promises of doing your banking, making a living from posting, and being “the biggest social platform on earth” have of course not happened, even a little bit. He will never set foot on Mars. He is at best a goldfish-brained man who cannot remember what promises he made, and at worst (and most likely) an inveterate liar who loves adulation and money above all else. So it’s fairly unsurprising that the changes he made to X all fit into this mold: half-assed, lazy, designed to save money, and just downright idiotic in general.
I could probably write a hundred thousand word piece about my thoughts on Elon and how his weird little fucked up brain works, but that’s not my main goal here - what I really want to share with you is how his leadership (lol) has left the greatest website in history completely unusable, and how truly odd all the ways it sucks actually are. So let’s get into it.
The “Diverse Viewpoint” Lie
One of the common and oft-repeated “true-isms” from centrists and generally annoying online characters is that having a diverse array of viewpoints is healthy for The Discourse. This may actually have been true at one point in history - I’m sure the Gore Vidal vs William F. Buckley debates were actually pretty stimulating and interesting (if for no other reason than Buckley’s insane and now-extinct Brahmin accent) - but that is not the world we live in now - and certainly not the world of 2024 Twitter. The idea that anyone from the right would engage with your viewpoints with any degree of seriousness or intellectual honesty is absurd - at best you will get someone calling you a libtard, at worst you will get someone named “HitlerGroyper1488” threatening to rape your family. I’m sure this is probably very fun for them, but it’s crazy to think that this is some kind of higher meeting of the minds, or even something that would be worth anyone’s time. I have a woman named “Karen Orlando” (lmao) who replies to every one of my posts about trans bathroom stuff, even if the post has nothing to do with trans people at all. And there are millions of Karen Orlandos on Twitter now, and they know that under Elon, they have run of the place.
The idea that “if we open up the discussion to everyone, the best opinions will win out” is genuinely child-brained stuff. It’s the sort of mindset I would expect from a middle school debate society dweeb, but not anyone who has spent actual time online in any sort of proximity to the American right. It’s the approach you take when nobody actually wants to talk to you, so you have to make them talk to you. And listen, I am not against Arguing On The Internet - actually I am one of it’s biggest proponents…but there’s an old saying - “never wallow with a pig in the mud, because you get dirty and the pig likes it” - that I think is particularly valid here. There is nothing to be gained by existing in the same space as these people, other than to offer them an outlet to screech about trans bathrooms or the Biden Crime Family or whatever their weird hyperfixation is at the time. Saying that debate is “healthy” also presumes that the only reason for posting is to find some sort of political compromise with people who you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire - and I personally post for FUN. Sometimes it’s to get a point across, but mostly it’s just for shits and giggles! And that is just fine. People post for all different reasons.
The Monetization Problem
This, like many of the changes Musk has made to Twitter, was obviously going to be a trainwreck-level issue to anyone who has a passing knowledge of how the site actually works. Until Elon’s arrival, the only real incentive to post anything was to get a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine rush that comes from watching the number of hearts on a tweet go up (bbbbrrrrrr). And this was the ideal scenario - it attracted true posting addicts who are only in it for the love of the game, rather than grifters and opportunists. But with the new monetization program, the incentive structure has changed, and now nearly every viral post you see on your feed is just some no-effort slop designed to garner engagement from the lowest-common-denominator types. Old viral videos, race-baiting fight clips, spurious “science” posts from accounts that have zero clue how anything scientific works - these are the new bread and butter for Twitter, and it’s super shitty. Try scrolling through a Twitter video feed for a couple minutes - you will get what I’m talking about. It feels similar to Facebook, but somehow worse, because I never loved Facebook, and I really, really loved Twitter. It’s like watching someone defile the corpse of a loved one, stringing it up like a marionette and making you watch as it arythmically dances around for coins.
The Nazis Are So, So Weird Now
Where to begin here…the most prominent Nazi on Twitter right now is a five foot tall, catboy-dating gay Mexican, and it only gets stranger from there. The psychosexual walls seem to have come down for this group following Trump’s recent election win, and their internal discourse has gotten fucking crazy as a result. With fewer and fewer left-leaning enemies to contend with on the site, their guns have turned on each other - and those guns are so incredibly weird. Everyone they don’t like (mostly other Nazis) is a secret Jewish homosexual (bad), but somehow being a gay pedophile is “based”. Having a wife is gay (bad version), but not having sex with women is decided not gay. In the past week alone, I have encountered a proud meth-using confederate anime nazi chastising other nazis for being “fake methcels”, several adult men loudly fantasizing about raping young boys, and a litany of other Guy Types that I had no idea were things until now. Even after all these years on the internet, I’m still discovering new kinds of freaks - that’s a small silver lining I suppose.
The Nazi Classics are all still in there - Jews control the world, all minorities are bad, etc. But these seem to increasingly take a back seat to absolutely insane and unintelligible group sexual dynamics that I simply cannot get my mind around. More than anything, it seems like a genuinely miserable bunch to find oneself in - as nobody seems to really be having any fun at all. One prominent nazi spent hundreds of dollars on genetic history tests (which are fake btw) to prove to his followers that he was indeed of the very narrow genetic background he thought they might respect - but even that was met with further accusations of Jewishness, gayness, lying, being a Laplander etc. In the end, they are the dog who caught the car. They spent so much time dreaming of a world where they had total cultural dominance over Twitter, and now that they have it, all they seem to be able to do is accuse each other of sucking Jewish dicks and being secretly Indian. Bleak.
The Information Drain
As was reported recently (but anyone who still uses the site has noticed well before that), Twitter now de-emphasizes outside links on the feed, so that users will spend more time on “X” and not on other sites. It’s a classic social media giant move that never, ever works and always ends up making the content immensely shittier. What this effectively means for Twitter users specifically is that you see almost zero articles or news stories in the course of your average scroll-session, and way more "native news content” - which generally takes the form of race-baiting “news” posts from inbred Polish simpletons like the guy who runs “Visegrad24”, hundreds of Israeli “open source intel” hasbara accounts, or 30,000 word posts from famed online-whiner / wife-respecter Bill Ackman. Gone are the days where you hear about a news event first from Twitter, despite the “CEO” Linda’s insistence that “it’s all happening on X!” - it’s just content slop now. Everything is content slop. It also de-incentivizes actual creators from posting their work on the site, as the returns are ever-diminishing. I have nearly six times the follows on Twitter as I do on Bluesky, but more traffic comes in to this newsletter from Bluesky. This was obviously a conscious decision on Elon’s part, and a characteristically idiotic one. I know he’s too socially-unintelligent to understand why this is, but normal people can see it pretty clearly. What was once the best place to stay informed about the world is now the worst, a dying mall where the only stores that are still open sell knockoff products and racist t-shirts.
Everyone Is So, So Much Dumber Now
The most overarching observation I can make about late-2024 Twitter is this: everyone is fucking dumb as shit. Medieval peasant brain is back with a vengeance, and nothing of value is created. I haven’t seen a really good shitpost in I don’t know how long. People are fearmongering about Krampus (???). Jay-Z is drunkposting PR statements about explaining child rape to his children (and promoting it with Twitter Ads!). Discussions about celebrities are, if possible, stupider than anything I’ve ever seen in my life, carried out by people who seem to lack object permanence and maybe some parts of their frontal lobe. Twitter used to be dumb in an awesome way, with celebrities like Shaq posting stuff like “im at knots berry farms n my butts 2 big 2 fit in da seats on ride. ahhhhhh (dats me yellin)”. Now it’s dumb in the worst possible ways, alternating between too evil and too mind-numbingly moronic to even engage with. The celebrities have fled. The content creators have fled. The writers and journalists and authors and artists have fled. Twitter is now the land of the most cringe-inducing and sad parts of our society, all churning out content slop, hasbara, and psychosexual drama as they bow humbly at the feet of their 58 year old epic memeking. Maybe one day he will be forced to sell the thing, but with Trump in office and Elon’s personal net worth fast approaching literally one trillion dollars, I wouldn’t bet on it. The ship is going down, and you can either be on one of the lifeboats or you can be in the band. I know which one I’m choosing.
Plus, there is one more, fundamental reason to quit Twitter for Bluesky/Substack that people seem to miss. (beyond Twitter/X political sympathies, censorship, and propaganda). In Substack/Bluesky you technically own your audience, while in Twitter you don't. Twitter owns them. The moment you quit, you lose all your contacts. I just wrote about it: https://4two.substack.com/p/how-to-own-your-audience