I don’t want to write about Twitter again. And yet here I am, putting keyboard to CMS, trying to make some sense out of the increasingly bizarre decisions flowing out of its HQ. The latest updates: Twitter says it will get rid of “legacy verifications” on April 1st1 and that it will change its For You feed to more prominently show posts from Twitter Blue subscribers.
The impending death of the legacy checkmark is as good as any a time to reflect on Twitter. I think it marks the end of one era of the internet — one way of thinking about life online — and the ugly dawn of another. So let’s talk about it.
Twitter was a website made of compromises. But personally, I always thought it felt like the closest thing to a utility as a social media company could get. It was genuinely useful, as both a place to track events as they happened and as a forum for a constellation of overlapping communities. Its utility was such that it inspired at least one person to lock themselves to the company’s front door to try and get their account back2.
After the deal closed and Elon Musk took over the site, back in late October, things started to change very quickly. The compromises were ignored, and then trampled over; Twitter has been transformed into a site that serves the whims of one guy. It’s his place, catered directly to his awful taste. In upending the site’s norms and culture, Musk has managed to destroy all of the cachet the site had amassed since 2006. People have taken to the lifeboats, and they were the only reason the site was worth visiting in the first place. It was a website of insane, revealing lapses and tossed-off thoughts, but it did, for a while, feel like a place you could find community.
Anyway, I think the idea of verification made a lot of people insane. You got a check if you were notable or if you’d just worked at a blog in in the mid-10s, when Twitter was courting journalists.
Verification granted you access to special features, which all basically amounted to spam filters3. Which makes sense, if you’re one of those actually famous people: tons of people clog up your mentions and it’s nice to have tools to help deal with it. But the thing about the process, the thing that drove some people online mad, was that the process of getting verified was totally opaque. Though eventually you could apply for a badge, it was up to the mysterious beings who ran the site whether you got one or not.
Eventually, those people who became insane came to believe that “bluechecks” — they made up their own slur (?), for some reason — were getting privileged treatment. They began to think that shadowy figures working behind the scenes at Twitter were limiting the reach of their tweets; they thought the bans handed down by the mods were biased, and unfair4. One of these people, Elon Musk, hatched a plan: he’d buy the site and make it democratic. And as the richest and therefore the smartest man in the world, only he could fix Twitter’s problems. He would be a hero, a savior. He would be memed, but in the good way.
And he did democratize the blue verified badge. Now you can buy it, if you’re willing to spend around $100 a year. But obviously that has made it worthless, because a bought check means nothing.
Thus, a new era online, or something. Instagram has rolled out a similar program, although they have paired it with the promise of actual customer service — which is a tangible benefit, at least? In any case, I think Twitter’s ongoing demise at the hands of one rich goon is instructive, because it recalls so many other beautiful things destroyed by rich goons. And it also calls to mind the ongoing conservative project to decimate and privatize public goods, just so someone can make money off of them.
It does not feel particularly good to be at the mercy of the whims of the wealthy in every aspect of life. It is uncomfortable to think about, the idea that realistically you live and serve at the pleasure of people who can radically change the conditions of your existence if they feel like it. It is important to remember that all this began as a whim. Elon Musk wanted a toy, and he wanted to feel like a hero, so he bought Twitter — something that nobody should have been able to buy. He’s breaking his plaything now, secure in the knowledge that someone else will be around after to pick up the pieces.
You, like me, are just a user, watching the carnage through a window: what we want, what we care about, is absolutely irrelevant. We are on the other side of the glass, and that pane is very, very hard to break. But next time this happens, even elsewhere, perhaps one of us will pick up a brick.
As always,
Bijan
An inauspicious date, imo.
She’s back, post-Elon.
I think you may have also gotten more prominent rankings in search, but that’s about it? Let me know if I’m forgetting stuff in a comment.
To be fair, it wasn’t always clear why the banhammer was applied.