How Musk trashed twitter

I’ve noticed many dislikable trends since Elon Musk took over twitter.

First, the system is broken. Rebranded as X, which no-one likes, the whole interface has changed. My main access was via tweetdeck, which is now only available via premium subscription, and then it does not work as before. For example, before, I could have all my accounts on tweetdeck. Now, it’s just one by one. Equally, even when using X, a lot links you click on do not work. There's a bug there.

Second, I now get huge numbers of sponsored adverts and posts from accounts I don’t follow, instead of the news and accounts and friends that I do follow.

Third, the network that used to follow me is no longer re-tweeting my tweets. In the past, almost every tweet would get a like or retweet. Today, it’s like a desert of silence. I’m guessing it’s because I’ve criticized Elon several times over the past six months, so we automatically get marked as an enemy.

He is such a child.

I am using twitter purely to record my activities, but am likely to stop using this platform fyi.

Interestingly, it is one thing to piss-off sponsors and advertisers, who have left in droves – the BBC reports advertising has halved since he appeared – and you can demotivate the whole workforce by sacking half of them, but when you start pissing off users … well.

I’ve been on twitter since 2008, and so fifteen years of habit it being broken. It’s like cutting off a key resource on the network. Sure, LinkedIn and Facebook are there, but they’re not the same.

For example, way back when, I followed activist movements live on twitter from the relaxed view of my desktop. Hashtags work. Now they don’t. Thanks Elon. The whole platform has been trashed.

Writing for ZDNet, Steven Vaughan-Nichols observes that “a quarter of Twitter users said they 'are not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.” I am one of them.

Having spent fifteen years building an audience of almost 60,000 people, the whole thing has been killed by this idiot.

He is a man I used to respect. His life has not been a coast. Elon’s almost gone bankrupt several times and has taken huge risks to build huge empires in Tesla and SpaceX. At one time, I pondered whether he was the real Tony Stark.

That was almost eight years ago before he was smoking dope and making silly bets. A silly bet, such as spending $44 billion on twitter which I am sure he regrets.

The issue is that, in that regret, his direction is to destroy the company Jack Dorsey built

Now, for all those non-twitter (X) users out there, I am sure this does not matter but, for those of us who used it as our main information source (me), it is like losing an arm or leg.

The problem is that there is no similar service. Sure, Meta launched Threads, which no-one is really using, and there is Instagram and stuff, but it’s not the same. Therefore, some of us have to unravel fifteen years of building a network of contacts and news sources and start all over again.

Thank you Elon Musk for ruining one of the best media and network sources in the world and oh, yes, you are definitely not Tony Stark.

Nevertheless when you are the richest guy in the world, with a net worth of around $250 billion, losing $44 billion is just when I gamble on a horse and it comes last.