Tweeting the Twitter

 Swirling the drain.

Hmm? How does Twitter connect to gaming? Oh, well that's a very good question you see... the thing is that... well many game developers and big companies actually make use of Twitter in order to post announcements about... look, just leave me alone okay, I want to talk about Twitter! It is, you see, commonly referred to as the modern day Forum of the Internet, probably because Reddit is designed in such a manner that it locks people within their own vacuous echo chambers whereas Twitter at least makes it possible to interact with the rest of the world. (Although it is still a place for echoing opinions if you go to the right corners of it.) I'm not a huge Twitterer myself, I have a couple of accounts and I've only Tweeted once in the past five years and it was for this blog. But I can't just not be interested in what happens on Twitter; that would be wanton and callous negligence of the world around me; and I ain't just like that.

Going on just a few minutes ago has revealed that, just like I heard, the front page has changed into a trending tab so I got served news about the latest Elon Musk Tweet despite avoiding the man like the plague. Such is appropiate in Twitter's algorithmic mind because Elon is now the de-facto ruler of Twitter ever since he pledged to buy it, whined about his pledge, dedicated several months to whining about and devaluing the company, and then turned around and bought it at a wildly over-inflated price. (Don't point out how stupid that sounds; his fans are like loyalist cultists; they'll die for him.) Elon has fired everyone who was running Twitter before him, probably somewhat due to the frustration he went through to buy the thing in the first place, and is now left making as many rash and ill-thought-out changes as possible to try and buff up his ego and prove how results driven he is. (If only he was that 'results driven' when it came to creating true self driving, or building that robot to the standard he said he could. Or the Cybertruck. Or Rockets that can match what NASA's can do. Or literally anything substantial he has teased over the past half decade.)

Most like myself assumed that Elon Musk was only signing on to Twitter so that he could fulfil his role as the platform's next absent father; but it would appear that we all have egg on our faces after it's become readily apparent that Musk intends to run the platform with a mix of selective committee votes (He's addicted to public approval; Twitter really was the perfect match for him) and childish bouts of wanton fancy. The home page was just the beginning, because now it seems our South African Billionaire has his sights on changing the landscape of the Twitter world under the guise of securing monetisation. Which at the end of the day would offer him mere pennies when it comes to making back the several billion he spent acquiring the platform. (But big changes start small, right?)

The big change now is based around the famous Twitter verification checkmark; but unfortunately I can't get all "in the weeds" about what he did without explaining the mark itself. The checkmark was invented as a tiny badge that would be forever visible next to the name of recipient so that the person in question can be verified at a glance during a conversation. This was devised in a time when copycat Twitter accounts taking the names of celebrities and using their reputation to flog scams were common, it was a way for those famous people to take back their name. However, the general public is incurably dumb and the name-stealing grift is still very popular and somewhat successful. However, the blue mark eventually developed a new meaning. It became a badge of recognition and endorsement from the Twitter HQ, and a mark of genuine authenticity that can even go so far as to increase a influencer's chance of being sought out for promotion deals. Those without the mark have a tendency to assume it's purely a vanity symbol, because it's natural nebbish nature to assume the worst of everyone who isn't you. But there's a bizarre functionality and genuine professional value attributed to the mark totally unintentional of it's creation. 

Alas, at least that's what the mark used to be about. Elon Musk has declared a seismic shift in the universe with his new plan to apply a monetary value toward the check mark functionality so that anyone who wants to have one can pay for it, and any one who already had one needs to pay a monthly fee for upkeep. It's a neat little scheme to make literally pocket cage in revenue, but one he wants to try and make standard across the platform so that everyone starts paying a monthly subscription and what starts as a miniscule profit turns into the big profit maker of Twitter. I just don't know whether he's trying to supplement ad support or circumvent it all together so that he can be free to do whatever he wants with the platform without having to worry about kowtowing to ad suppliers. Either way, the plan will only be a success if people adopt it.

Which is somewhat hard to justify when it's so clear how utterly disorganised Elon is being with this plan. He declared it to be introduced in a matter of weeks with a $20 price tag, only to lower it to $8 monthly when challenged by Steven King. (I suspect this is a classic over pricing haggle method, but it makes you look extremely unprofessional when you do it on the public forum.) Now he's trying to convince us that we're being cheap if we don't shell out for his $8 dollar plan, and in fact that's about as much as we would spend on our Starbucks Frappuccino. Now first of all; what kind of brain-addled moron spends $8 on coffee? Those who do need to have their bank accounts seized; they're a danger to their own finances! Secondly; comparing food with a subscription to a social media platform is an infantile level of arguing. They're entirely incomparable, and doing so dismisses the fact that Twitter has historically always been free. Last I checked; Starbucks ain't never given it's drinks away for free!

But it's an opt in service- right? Well only for now. As it turns out, Elon wants to start making the blue check marks take priority in conversations and algorithms; with anyone who doesn't have the almighty mark being relegated to the plebs at the bottom of the feed. "That's the trolls and bots" says the man with the receding braincell count. So to summarise; Elon Musk is trying to commercialise a free speech platform so that you have to pay up in order to be heard on the same stage as other's who pay. Essentially spitting in the face of everything Twitter once stood for, all in a desperate attempt to squeeze a profit out of a unspeakably bad purchase. If the secret rumour that Elon wanted to buy Twitter just to shut it down were even remotely true, I'd call this a genius move. But the man isn't that smart; as he's happy to prove time and time again.

Some said that Elon was talking a big game with all but hot air, and that he ultimately wouldn't end up changing Twitter one bit. They were wrong. Elon has currently given a major ultimatum to the platform that is either going to tank it completely or utterly change it's identity. Whichever the direction, Elon has just committed to murdering the Internet's forum in cold blood and turning it into something cold and heartless; like modern day Tumblr. All of which makes me wonder if, at the end of the day, this isn't just Elon getting back at that one twitter account that dedicated itself to tracking his private jet usage across the world to point out the hypocrisy of the 'clean energy' car CEO. An account he tried to get banned for no other reason than he didn't like what they were saying, completely contrary to that 'free speech' malarkey he claims to care about. Oh, and he's already banning people who change their name to Elon Musk with a check mark to prove how moronic his system is... He says "free speech" so often, I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.