My eX
It’s been a long time coming since 2009, when I first tweeted
Checking out twitter for no real reason other than to play with micro-blogging
Back then all of the posts were under 140 characters because they were sent and received as individual SMS text messages. In less than a week of my first tweet I was playing with the Twitter API & attempting to connect it to Flickr. Twitter didn’t even show images yet, just links — some sites popped up just to host photos and short-links to better fit twitter’s post-length restrictions. The web was free, open, and interoperable part of the real world for the first time; what a time to be alive. Sadly, so much from from that era are dead now — especially links, entire websites lost to the sands of time through digital decay.
We all had a lot fun along the way, liveposting all our meals and bathroom breaks to the world and confusing all the traditional media players through our microblogging shenanigans, communities and classes formed around making twitter bots, business popped up all over that ran on the platform, it became a live action newscenter, then it turned into a cultural powerhouse. Twitter was exciting, until the culture wars began and the world’s wealthiest crybaby got his feelings hurt by the consequences of his own actions & unfunniness and decided to ruin it for the rest of us, buying and gutting Twitter & rebuilding it in his image, as it X. I thought for sure the site would crash and burn right then, as he tore out pieces without understanding them, and expelled most of the people who held deep institutional knowledge on a whim - but apparently he hired enough of them back to stave off disaster.
Elon Musk said he wanted more Free Speech, really he wanted more attention, a new timeline popped up where the algorithm could push posts Musk wanted you to see whether you followed the account or not, he wanted more boosts so he had his team goose his numbers, he didn’t like being blocked, so he removed blocking (enabling stalkers and trolls), he created a new AI that will soon feed on all the data Twitter has access to, and sell it to 3rd parties. Bit by bit he killed off what little protections Twitter had and turned it to his nefarious will. It was a powergrab.
With that API and others I built bots to share/promote local events, food trucks, tell bad jokes, write bad poetry, promote subreddits, pretend to be human, and now they’re all gone - the first good part of Twitter to truly die. The good times for bot-makers & academic researchers ended on Feb 2nd 2023 when Elon Musk pulled the plug on Twitter’s free and open APIs to “cut down on spam.” The problem is, the spam persisted. Even worse, the spam started coming from the platform itself. Advertised posts started appearing with Community Notes telling people that they linked to a dropshipping scam and the product was of lower quality and offered at cheaper prices elsewhere. The Spam was probably intentional, you see Elon paid more than what Twitter was worth, so our fun cheeky bots that posted art and jokes and poetry and worked research projects that had a direct connection to the general public had to die so that he could afford to pay the piper.
Musk’s been posting more and more deranged things, boosting racist far-right propaganda & conspiracy theories personally and algorithmically, re-instating banned far-right1 accounts while banning accounts that oppose them, he even joined Trump’s political campaign2. Now, Musk’s newfound interest in politics has led to him getting a newly invented job in a shiny new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE, like the cryptocurrency meme/scam Musk runs) government agency, despite him already being a government contractor through his other tech firms this is somehow not a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest don’t seem to matter much in the government anymore, and the party of small government doesn’t seem to mind creating new departments and massive deportation programs.
But what about my “eX” … well, I won’t contribute to a project like this, at all. My twitter account has been mostly inactivate, logging on is like getting hit in the face with a mud pie, so I’m going to delete it. nyhow, the Fediverse is more fun, more focused, more interesting — a better quality of life all around. Moderators are accountable and available and doing their jobs. I’ve been there for a few years now - moving some of my old twitter bots and reworking their brains and trying new ideas - most of the best of old twitter is now federated, thanks activitypub! Now even Reputable Media and celebrities are fleeing, Twitter is dead and X can go with it.
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/ REST \
/ IN \
/ PEACE \
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| Twitter |
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| killed by a |
| powergrab |
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| 2022 |
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