I am so tired of this.
I’ve not fully abandoned Twitter yet because there are many marginalized groups saying that they want people to stay and fight and that makes good sense. The problem is that fighting a character like Elon Musk is so tiring because he’s one of those guys who’ll claim victory no matter what and, to make it worse, his fanbase loves nothing more than harassing anyone in their leader’s crosshairs.
I’ve blocked Musk on his own site because he doesn’t ever say anything useful or positive (and seldom true), so the only way to make the site work for me is to hide him. Unfortunately, so much of the talk is about him and so many people screenshot his tweets and repost them that I’m still inundated with the thoughts of one of the most vacuous men ever to have a pulpit.
Oh, and he’s also a piece of human dogshit. His whole management style is like a mashup of Homer Simpson and Calvin Candie. Bullying, cajoling, racism…it’s all there, and he expects people to burn themselves out in order to make turn Twitter into a mirror image of its owner.
Which, to be honest, is just a cut-rate 4Chan.
I mean, it’s worse than 4Chan. While he’s actively engaging in policies that will, among other things, increase child pornography on the site, he (falsely) accuses his former head of Trust and Safety of being a pedophile. This led to a wave of death threats against the guy, something that anyone who’d ever used Twitter (and/or met any of Elon’s fans would have seen coming a mile away). Elon is such a pedo guy (and, to be clear, I mean that in Musk’s use of the term, not to imply that he is himself a pedophile)!
Those are big things. The small ones are almost more annoying because they’re so petty. For example, the business where he was booed at the Dave Chappelle show. Man, it happens. You think you’ve got a good gag and instead, the crowd turns on you because of all the stuff I just listed. You just take it. Maybe you sit and think for a while and ask yourself “Why would someone as rich as me be so unpopular?” Or, if you were Elon Musk, you’d say something like:
Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter). It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.
First of all, “technically?” Bro, when you’re that wrong, pulling the “technically” bit is a really dumb look. It was not “90% cheers” and everyone knows it. And then, to blame it on “unhinged leftists”? Maybe that makes sense to him. He bought a site with a right-wing bias baked in and proceeded to purge the voices of everyone to the left of him, which, in fairness, is probably something close to 90% of all people. Maybe he’s just saying that shit to try to get pats on the back from his far-right buddies, but it just comes across as pathetic.
Finally, there’s the fact that the site doesn’t work worth a damn anymore. Notifications are constantly dropped. Account reports are ignored. I see the same tweets on a loop and I’m deluged with pornbot accounts trying to befriend me, which is nowhere near as hot as it sounds. Even with my now-copious use of the block button, it’s a shit experience. I guess that means he’s succeeded in remaking it in his image.
And yeah, I get it: It’s my fault for engaging at all. Everyone knows what he is. He’s not going to listen to criticism. He’s a wannabe “edgelord” who doesn’t understand that his own tweets would be shadowbanned under his own policies, but he doesn’t care because he’s fucking Elon and rules don’t apply to him. I know this, so I know I’m just wasting my breath.
I don’t know how one can try to get a service to change its ways without leaving, but what the hell? I might as well give it a go. I can certainly use it to post stuff that might be useful to the workers who were laid off, or to those who are stuck there because of the terms of their visas, or to people who are migrating to competing sites, or…*shrug* I don’t know. I’m just making it up. But, Twitter was near and dear to my heart and I hate seeing some dude buy it and just take a huge dump on everything that was good about it. If anyone has any useful ideas, I’m all ears.
-RK