#there are no platforms left with people on it that isn't in the shitter. twitter is a laughable alternative. cohost is unprofessional.

[raymoohackery]

everything that must be said about the mostrecent fiasco has already been said but to say "i'm leaving tumblr because it's too racist and transmisogynistic. here's my twitter username"

......... yeah? yeah? yeah?

[samtheflamingomain]

twitter down the shitter

I'm human. A real, meat-being. So of course I'm on social media.

Except Twitter. It has too many buttons and people I don't know. It scares me. I believe my tweet count is in the low double-digits.

So to see the whole Elon Musk debacle, as someone who will never be remotely impacted on a personal level by whatever the fuck he does to Twitter? I feel I'm in a sociologically interesting position.

I was going to make a comparison to a ref, but refs get paid to care about the integrity of the game. The only thing Twitter ever did that impacted me in any way was the ban of Trump, because that meant less things for Stephen Colbert to make fun of him for. I was a whole-ass week late to covfefe.

So, as someone with zero stake in the game (only focusing on Twitter itself, not any economic implications), I'm just... I wouldn't say amused, but almost.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes, any large change in ownership of something as massive as Twitter will have effects that ripple out. It could be harmful, especially in the wrong hands.

But here's the thing that I don't think a lot of people want to hear: the hands could be worse. Yes, he was born with a silver spoon up his ass and has some trash-fire takes. He's made some bad decisions, in business and otherwise.

But he's not stupid. As much as it pains me to say it.

I'm the insufferable philosopher that says "intelligence is a social construct, no one is 100% unintelligent". But without any caveats, he's a smart man.

But... he's also extremely selfish and impulsive, and I'd say it gets in the way of his intelligence.

Musk is absolutely a weird, toxic, incel-y dude. He's Michael Scott if he were a billionaire aware of 4chan.

As a die-hard socialist, I hate him on principle. But compared to all the other billionaire assholes, he really isn't the worst of the bunch. If Bezos was doing this, I'd actually be alarmed. He already owns the means by which most people buy EVERYTHING. Musk has a space hobby and one car thing. He's certainly filthy rich, but I'd argue that he doesn't have a whole lot of power.

But I mean that in one very narrow sense: I don't think anything Musk does is ever going to influence law-making or precedent-setting the way many other billionaires have done.

Again, billionaires should not exist, eat the rich, etc. But I think people who use Twitter are... overreacting.

I get the feeling that a lot of people see Twitter as THE social media, or at least the biggest. Maybe it is. But it's not the only one.

At one point, Myspace was the biggest. Then we moved on. We all, eventually, abandoned it completely for Facebook.

It's 20 years later, though. I don't know of anyone who is ONLY on Twitter. We're all on, say, 3 different social media - is one of them going to shit going to cause a Myspace-like exodus from the platform?

Probably not. Here's why: I'm not the only one who has an account for every site but uses only a few. It's different for everyone. Some have Insta just to see others' posts. Some have FB just to talk to that one family member. Some have Reddit just to glance at r/all once a week.

Social media is no longer all-or-nothing. Very few are die-hard "fans" of any one site. If Twitter becomes a cesspool, I don't think it means the end of it, but maybe a shift in attention to a different platform. Maybe it becomes the platform we all check now and then to see what politicians are saying.

At the same time, I think any such change would be very, very slow. People that like their Main social medium will cling to it as it sinks. See: me and tumblr.

Aaaaallll this to say, to go back to my outside-looking-in viewpoint, I don't think Twitter will look much different one year from now.

This goes back to Musk being not the worst possible hands for Twitter to be in. Selfish and impulsive, but also smart. He's not Trump, going bankrupt left and right.

And maybe I'll lose some people here, but let me don my tinfoil hat for just a moment: he's marketing.

All the weird tweets, bad takes, inflammatory threads... he's just trying to make waves. He's a smart man, but he's not a genius.

A smart man makes people write articles about him. A genius plays it quiet.

As an outsider, it seems glaringly obvious that he's simply fanning the flames, getting everyone to write about him. And clearly it's working. Look at me at this exact second.

But this kind of marketing only works when you back it up. When right-wingers are disappointed at his actual level of involvement and leftists are disappointed at all this leading to jack-shit, it's gonna be onto the next one.

We got a little tired of Ukraine and decided Twitter was important enough, and too many people gave Musk a bit too much attention. But totally honest, I think he's more selfish than he is smart, and that will be his downfall, and 6 months from now we'll all be laughing about the time Musk thought he could Change Twitter.

I've been wrong before, though. All we can do is watch the show.