X Marks the Spam |
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17 November 2023 - Midgard
Every day now I wake up to mentions on Twitter. And every day they are crypto spam.
No, I can't get over Elon Musk renaming one of my favorite platforms his favorite letter, X. And everybody else in the world knew what Twitter was, too. Why blow up a brand like that? I haven't read one article referencing a tweet on X that doesn't also explain that the platform used to be called Twitter. And X.com still redirects to Twitter.com, so why don't we all just keep calling it Twitter? The first change I noticed after Musk took over was that my two factor authentication went away. Why would anyone continue to use "Log in with Twitter" on other platforms with two-factor authentication? Google, LinkedIn and Facebook all provide two-factor authentication for free. Although Facebook has started asking me to subscribe for a fee just like Twitter is asking for a fee to get back my MFA. And the developer platform still mostly references Twitter.
The rebranding of one of the best known brands on the planet was not just a dumb idea, but it was also very poorly implemented. And the ability for fake accounts to suddenly get "verfied" by paying a small fee was ill-conceived as well. It's like Musk forgot the problem the "verified" emblem on people's profiles was trying to solve. But, giving credit where credit is due, including the ability to edit posts in the subscription fee is a feature people have long asked for. I made sure to download all my tweets while that feature was still available, and sure enough Twitter is now charging to use their API. Since Twitter's API was the first social media API I programmed with back in 2009, this change too was a sad one.
So, yeah, today I muted Twitter notifications on my phone. There are still a lot of CS people using the platform, so I will continue to as well. Less censorship is a good thing if Musk has really brought that to Twitter. Trump is back, but not posting much. Milo Yiannopoulos is still not though. Twitter has published a blog on how they chose Tweets "For You", but I still prefer getting all the Tweets of people I'm "Following" ordered by timestamps. Twitter reamins the only major social media platform that lets you consume posts this way.
