You might've heard something about that.

Over the past few months, there'd been a lot of back-and-forth about the proposed sale of Twitter, and I was doubtful that it would actually happen. It's still hard for me to believe that Elon Musk plopped down $44 billion to buy the social network he's addicted to!

Coming in, I was cautiously optimistic about the sale. Twitter's atmosphere has steadily grown more caustic over the past decade - even after muting dozens of words from my timeline, I find it to be an extremely angsty place. My real-life friends have always preferred other social networks, and a lot of people I know from the online world have quit Twitter. Twitter has struggled to grow its userbase and make money, and Twitter's leaders have poured a lot of resources into chasing terrible ideas like Fleets and NFTs. 2022 Twitter is a flaming heap of hot garbage, and I thought that better leadership could help make Twitter a nice place again. And I knew that if he made it even worse and killed Twitter, I wouldn't shed any tears. (OK, I'd cry for the cute little blue bird - the bird is cute and doesn't deserve this kind of treatment.)

Unfortunately, I have serious doubts that Elon Musk is making things better. As the newly-crowned Twictator, he's made a lot of changes that feel arbitrary and poorly-planned. He gets an idea, waves his magic wand, and declares, "It shall be" - even if it means subjecting his own employees to absurdly intense pressure to deliver stuff quickly. I can understand why he might consider a "premium user" system, but muddling the existing verification system (a useful and important feature) and suppressing the voices of users who choose not to pay to get verified are terrible ideas that are going to drive away a lot of users.

The BT Forums might not be the most active place in the universe, but at least you don't have to pay $8 to prevent your posts here from disappearing into the ether.

I can't say this concisely and I'm intimidated by expressing my political views on the internet, but screw it, here goes nothing.

I'm not sure Musk's changes to the bird app make much sense to me, but I also think that under his leadership, it's going to quickly become obvious just how much power Twitter had to control online discourse. The previous regime removed a sitting president from their platform because he wouldn't stop making mean tweets that were of a political persuasion they didn't like... while allowing Ayatollah Khomeini to remain on the platform, even though he's a Holocaust denier. If you complained about this to the previous regime, they told you to build your own platform... and if you didn't know how to do that? Learn to code, because we don't give a d*** about anything but our own power.

I'm going to have to give this whole situation more time before I can say for sure, but I have doubts that Musk can screw the platform up more. I don't mean to imply that you're in this group, but I will say I'm skeptical of all the people who are going nuclear about being forced to pay $8 to participate on Twitter. If that's censorship, then so was removing DJT from Twitter.

Yeah, I know what you mean. While I have some doubts about Elon, it's also true that the old Twitter administration made a lot of really dumb decisions. The Twitter experience has steadily grown less enjoyable, and Twitter has lost money just about every year of its existence.

And yeah, Twitter's leaders were very capricious in handling high-profile controversial users. I can't say Twitter's overlords never punished a prominent left-leaning user, though it's pretty clear that Twitter tended to be more lenient on left-leaning posts that skirted the rules than on right-leaning posts.

That's one of the problems with social media in general - it concentrates a lot of power in the hands of a small number of people, usually people who aren't especially diverse in terms of demographics, geography, and philosophy. These leaders aren't necessarily very transparent in their decision-making processes, either. I think we'd all be better off with more competition in the world of social media, and with more influence for smaller forums and blogs and stuff.

I was never popular enough on Twitter to become the subject of any serious harassment or not-niceness, but I occasionally reported iffy tweets in other people's conversations when I came across them. Occasionally Twitter would - usually weeks later - send me a notification telling me whether they decided to do anything about the post I reported. Usually Twitter would remove posts that insinuated acts of violence, but otherwise they rarely took action. Even obvious spambots were usually deemed OK, as were the Chinese disinformation bots and trolls that insult people who criticize the CCP when commenting on articles about Chinese news. (Pro-Russia bots seem to prefer to congregate on LinkedIn rather than Twitter.)

Maybe Elon can make Twitter better - and if he doesn't, killing off Twitter would not be the end of the world.