It may have finally happened: After months of actively working to destroy Twitter, Elon Musk has nuked the platform altogether.
Now we have “X” — as in we are now ex-Twitter-users.
The move itself is hard to fathom. Twitter has become one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, reaching the point where it is one of a rarified family of products that is actually part of our vernacular.
You don’t search for something on the Internet. You Google it. Maybe if you get a cold you buy tissues, but chances are you say you’re buying Kleenex. Cut your arm? Use a Band-Aid. Now we don’t Tweet something, we X it? As in exit the app?
Musk hasn’t created a burning trash can — it’s a full-on dumpster fire. An inferno, even, burning to the ground the company he fought to pay $44 billion for and is now estimated to be worth just a third of that.
In place of Twitter, Musk envisions X as a Swiss Army Knife of a platform, where you Venmo money, Lyft home, GrubHub your dinner, then Netflix and chill.
By the way, ask any of the companies named in that previous sentence if they would change their entire brand to a single letter on the whim of their megalomaniacal leader.
Nevermind that there’s not a viable path right now for X to achieve this “Super App” status, particularly when the current operation is being held together with duct tape and baling wire.
They couldn’t even change the name on the building right, because removal of the Twitter sign was stopped midway through, nobody having bothered to get a permit from the city for the job.
All of this comes at a time when Musk’s nemesis, Mark Zuckerberg, is trying to make inroads with the launch of Threads. And if we’re rooting for Zuck to pull it off, it’s a sign of how bad things are at the platform formerly known as Twitter.
My initial review of threads is: Not great.
But neither is it Twitter. And, more importantly, Threads might have the financial backing needed to provide enough oxygen for it to build a critical mass of users to make it somewhat worthwhile. And “somewhat worthwhile” may be enough to finally bury the demised bird app for good.
Admittedly it’s a little bittersweet to watch Twitter slip into oblivion. I joined the platform in 2008, early compared to most, and spent a few years talking to, it seemed like, the same 10-15 people. Then it took off and was remarkably useful from a journalism standpoint — finding experts or sources or story ideas or promoting my work.
And it was a lot of fun, engaging with strangers, posting pics of my dogs on camping excursions, airing grievances about the Detroit Lions and launching the #VoteGehrke campaign.
These were the happy times. Then Elon happened.
He came in and slashed the engineering staff and unbanned a slew of accounts that frankly should have remained banned. Ad revenue plummeted. He started selling checkmarks.
Recently, he limited how many Tweets (or whatever we call them now) people are allowed to see, a bold move considering eyeballs on posts is pretty much the only reason the platform exists and the only product he has to sell to advertisers.
Still, it’s not the end of the world. Threads had to put similar limits on last week, much to Musk’s glee.
Even if you didn’t know or don’t care about any of that, you know Twitter has changed since Musk took over. Just open the app and you’ll see a swamp full of racist, misogynistic, hateful trolls that show up unsolicited in your feed, no matter how many you mute or block, plus a sprinkling of porn spam to top it off.
Just about anything positive the platform once offered is gone, leaving behind what is basically the planet’s dankest pit toilet. Lately, it feels like I use the “Block” feature nearly as often as the “Like.”
It’s enough to have driven Threads to more than 100 million users in the blink of an eye — although enthusiasm for and usage of the platform has died down since.
None of this is to say that Zuckerberg is the perfect hero here. Were he not cast opposite Musk, Zuckerberg would probably be the guy we’d all be wanting to fail.
Neither is Threads anywhere near perfect. It’s stripped down, needs to adapt to offer some sort of hashtag feature, refine its algorithm, find some way to monetize its audience and — if it wants to keep me around, at least — it needs a desktop version.
The biggest challenge Threads is facing, though, is that it has to break people out of their routine. In order to do that, it isn’t enough to be different than Twitter. Mastodon is different. BlueSky is different. Truth Social is very, very different.
Different only gets you so far. In Threads’ case, it creates enough buzz to churn up 100 million users. To keep them and to build, It needs to be better.
Threads has a little bit of a runway to take off, thanks to Zuckerberg’s deep pockets, but it won’t last forever. We’ve seen Zuckerberg abandon ideas in the past. His grandiose Metaverse seems teetering on the brink of collapse and Meta itself has been hit with thousands of layoffs.
Wherever Threads ends up, the point remains: The rebranded X is toxic and getting more so by the day. Whether Threads wows us and overwhelms its rival, or Elon keeps doing his thing and finishes the work he’s begun, Twitter and X need to dissolve into the toxic sludge it has helped to create.
Follow @RobertGehrke