Elon Didn’t End The Bird App, But He Clipped Its Wings
When I joined Twitter in 2009 it was a friendly, quirky, little place.
The idea of posting no more than 140 characters was baffling at first.
After a while of grappling with it, the tweeple who tapped these characters into their netbooks and desktops (no apps were available until the following year) became increasingly creative.
Twitter was named in part because of the short ‘tweets’ we shared, but also became known for another bird-like phenomenon.
I remember listening to a podcast at the time with a senior person at twitter. He said that he’d been looking at the stats for a major news story, and noticing that they moved like a murmuration of starlings.
Ideas took flight, and so did those who tweeted them.
Popularity and influence contests became a thing.
In my case, I won the Ms Twitter influence contest, beating major celebrities and their marketing teams, by rallying a group of writers, the Word Nerd Army, around the slogan:
The pen is mightier than the pin-up!
Instead of posting endless selfies, like other contestants, I put up an untouched pic and earned my votes by writing 140 character poems and stories against the clock.
At that point, ‘nerd’ was a bad word, and I understand it is again in some circles, but we made it cool for a lot longer than it takes to type 140 characters. After building a movement behind the term ‘word nerd’ I was overjoyed when we finally got a ‘day’ each January (the 9th).
The early developments in twitter were created by the Founders watching these murmurations and building tools around what they naturally did.
Retweets were first something we did manually.
Hashtags were our idea.
Follow Friday is no longer a big thing, but at one point it was huge, and that inspired Lists, for which I was fortunate enough to be on the beta team.
It felt unfettered, creative, and guided by the community rather than the owners at the start.
In time, algorithms took over, and in its last years before Elon Musk took over, that was no longer the vibe. However, it still felt like a place where anyone could build a community, a support network, and a business.
Then came Elon.
The Clipped Wings
Elon promised much. One of his main promises was greater freedom of expression. Another was fewer bots. Another was less spam.
What we actually got was a pay-to-play system which spurred the rest of the social media world to follow suit, in the midst of a cost of living crisis. The bots became uncontrollable, the spam is so plentiful that I’m not sure vegans could tolerate it now, and people aren’t only using AI to write all their content, but also their DMs and comments. They’re doing this because Elon’s app doesn’t encourage connection. It encourages chaos and total loyalty to the capricious algorithm.
The murmuration was caged. All could fly equally, but some flew more equally than others.
The algorithm has at different times penalised both small and large accounts. There is no logical pattern to it. A kind of intermittent reinforcement, that keeps people addicted to pleasing Elon.
Rest assured, even though he’s no longer CEO, he’s the face of the app. The ‘benevolent dictator’ to whom all content must bow.
I can’t claim that last statement was without bias. I freaking loved that bird app, and the way it freed people from hated jobs. But just because there is bias doesn’t mean there isn’t also truth.
Where indiepreneurs and word nerds could once fly free in the infinite sky of digital possibilities, they are now chickens in a barn, with ‘X’ on the door.
Their wings are clipped by hoards of bots, algorithms, and the breakdown of the ‘social’ part of ‘social media’.
X is no longer a place where people see the people they’ve chosen to follow. It is a place where people post the content most likely to create mayhem, because the app rewards mayhem.
Cock fights are illegal. But I dare you to watch the manosphere on X and not draw a parallel. Daily, I’m reminded that the term ‘alpha male’ doesn’t only come from a flawed study on wolves, but more commonly refers to the pecking order in a group of chickens.
Elon didn’t stop twitter being the bird app. He clipped its wings and made it into a battery-farmed chicken.
What are your thoughts? Do you miss twitter, or is X an improvement? And are these changes being reflected elsewhere on social media? Let me know in the comments.
Rebecca Bardess
© Rebecca Bardess Indiepreneur.Academy/blog
