Meta's Twitter alternative, Threads, is just a hours away, and I can only say that I've never been this excited for a Facebook-I-mean-Meta product ever, and I know I'm not the only one.
I am a daily Twitter user, the kind whose girlfriend constantly has to tell me that I need to get off my expletive phone.
In fairness, just under half of this time is work-related, since I need to follow a lot of people who make news that I need to cover. But even in the depths of the Twitter leakosphere about the new best graphics card contender or some processor benchmark, the quality of Twitter as a platform has absolutely tanked further than even I thought possible, and I was cynical from the start that Twitter owner Elon Musk had any clue about what he was doing.
As it turns out, he doesn't, and it shows in everything from the whole Twitter Blue verification debacle to the recent "temporary" view rate limiting that was arbitrarily imposed for reasons nobody's really quite sure of yet, but almost definitely has nothing to do with site scraping.
And, as it turns out, I'm fed up. Whether its Twitter's Nazi problem or its crumbling service quality, Musk's $44 billion boondoggle finally has a real, genuine competitor in Meta's Threads app, and I can tell you site unseen that I'm already going to make the jump, as will most of Twitter's userbase. Musk only has himself to blame.
Twitter cannot be saved
I love Twitter, for all its faults. At least I did, anyway. But there is no getting around the fact that Elon Musk has absolutely driven the platform into a ditch, and anyone who has had the unfortunate burden of having to follow him for work will tell you, this was entirely predictable.
Elon Musk is off-and-on the world's richest man, mostly thanks to how much Tesla stock he owns. To his credit, Tesla has pushed the electric vehicle market forward to viability, and has forced other car makers to come along with it, which is great if you care about climate change (leaving aside rare-Earth mineral mining, which is a nightmare).
He's also been at the head of SpaceX, and if you're a spacehead like me, you know the impact SpaceX has had in revitalizing space development, for better or worse.
Musk's role in both these endevours can sometimes be dramatically overstated by his legion of devotees, but there's no question that Musk is at least a major part, if not a driving force, behind these two success stories.
But those two companies have major regulatory bodies to answer to and experienced boards and staff that can help steer Musk down a more rational path.
Twitter on the other hand is strictly Musk's baby. There is no board, the industry is in the earliest days of possible regulation, and as a private company, Musk is in full control.
And it shows.
Twitter is now the embodiment of every one of Musk's childish impulses, like the constant cringe-inducing 420 references that his fans think are "epic" or the high school teenage libertarian politics that has led to some embarassing moments like his about face on free speech absolutism that every adult in the real world has to contend with but coddled CEOs who never hear no never really have to deal with.
From laying off half of Twitter's staff because he was being the Epic Boss Baby and laying down the law on those libtard lay-abouts who didn't want to work 100 hours a week (only to find that now Twitter's entire infrastructure is floundering and on its way to sinking entirely from lack of insider knowledge and maintenance) to comically and publically not paying any of the company's bills (thus wrecking any chance it will ever get financing or vendor support unless it's cash-and-carry), all of these problems are peak Musk.
But isn't Zuckerberg just as bad?
No. He's bad, awful even, but at least products like Facebook and Instagram are functionally useful to billions of people. Twitter is increasingly less so. Some billionaire is going to be harvesting my data, so I'll go with the one with a track record of running a competent ship.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeted out all the data that Threads is going to collect on its users, only to get slapped by replies showing that Twitter was just as bad. The fact is that the data harvesting horse has long left the barn, and pointing out how one company is awful and your company is slightly less so does nothing to move the needle for me.
None of our data should be harvested like this, but until there are actual laws like the GDPR in the EU, all of our data is fair game. If you're going to take my data and sell it, at least give me something useful in return other than Nazis in my replies and rate-limited posts from accounts I actually follow because Musk is too stupid to pay his bills like everyone else.
Yes, even if it sucks
And I'm saying this as a cisgender (not a slur) white guy, who doesn't have to endure the endless abuse that my friends have to endure because they are black, trans, or another of the endless target groups that self-described fascists have singled out for harassment.
And Musk thinks this is making Twitter better. As the world's richest man, Musk thinks that status validates his business acumen rather than reflects the structural inequalities of our time, so he will never change. And so neither will Twitter.
It has been kept alive because we didn't really have anywhere else to go. At 7PM EST on July 5, that all changes, thanks to Instagram Threads.
Will Threads be better? I have no idea, but I know that's where people are going to flock to since like five people are on BlueSky thanks to the invite-only nature of it.
Will it take time for Threads to take off? Sure, but I'm going where my friends and those I want to engage with are going, and everyone has been desperate for an escape hatch from the hellsite for nearly a year now. I will be joining them.
