Goodbye, Twitter, a place formerly known as cool
Both of my accounts are now deactivated. Bite me, Elon.
It took me a few years to jump on the Bird app. A lazy afternoon at Senoret Chemical down off Jefferson and I-44 turned into a friend signing another up for the new networking community available online. This was Jan. 2011, ten months before the St. Louis Cardinals won their last World Series, and the last time I was without a Twitter account.
Oh sorry, it’s called X now. A bland idea supported by one of the dumbest rich guys in the world. Elon Musk is the person who took over Twitter, and fired all of the techs behind the app’s construction. Shortly afterwards, he realized that he had no idea how to do some of the things that the fired parties could, so he hastily and pathetically hired them back. Well, he tried. That’s who got a hold of a place I grew to love.
Friends of mine would laugh at my fascination with Twitter, the frenzied anxiety factory that could put you on a pedestal and swiftly knock you off hours or minutes later. It was the home of a famous public shitstorm for me. That one time I tweeted that the Blues could be trading Robert Thomas to Buffalo for Ryan O’Reilly, not knowing those two players would celebrate the same Stanley Cup victory.
A hot tip from a pal got me to puke up something on Twitter, which sparked chaos. Before the end of the day, I was called every name in the book and was a guest on a Buffalo sports talk radio show. Broiled for simply believing a source too much and wanting a taste of journalistic fame under the guise of a rookie opinion-dispenser, one thing could be thanked for all of it: Twitter. As stressful and shitty as it got that day, I consumed the whole thing like a plate of nachos.
That was Twitter at its best! Good, bad or ugly, being in the action was the idea. Think of it as a social platform disguised as a Wall Street broker room at closing time. Opinions, news, ads, personal shit, more opinions, world news, and more opinions coming your way at 110 mph. Relentless and wildly untamed, it was the place to be if you had something to say and were willing to stand in front of it before hundreds of thousands of people.
While driving for Uber one night, I spotted a life-sized standee of The Rock lurking out of a window. After taking a picture and posting it to Twitter, he reposted it later, quoting the wrestling pic was how he walked around his own house. Nothing much, but a pure mood boost and recognition that social media connection was legit.
With no offense to any blog site or website, that was the place where words could get eyes. The pale agony of tweeting something out that probably wasn’t the best but also wasn’t bad enough to delete was toxically exciting. Putting something out that got celebrated carried all the glory of a touchdown on Monday Night Football, at least in my own slice of cyber heaven. Jumping on to find out The Rock tweeted your article out to his millions of followers was when it became surreal.
Like all things, though, it slowly got worse. Restrictions started to cover up or hide tweets. Voices were censored, but other louder and meaner voices were allowed to roam free. Musk came on, and made it all so much worse. He allowed Republican propaganda to find a lease somewhere, giving a platform to every MAGA asshat in the world and inviting sheer negativity. Sports takes and entertainment takes were drowned out for the latest Washington DC noise, and it got worse in the last four years.
The next four will be even worse, supersized to an even nastier level. So, I deactivated my last existing account. After ditching the OG account, last month, I reactivated the former sports only account to see if there was a reason to stay. Weeks later, the verdict came in that whatever coolness and value the website once carried was now drained out and gone.
Facebook may not block or completely silence Trump and the more hardcore sector of his supporters, but they censor and limit him at least. Also, I can delegate multiple pages to my material and feel like I’m having an actual conversation with someone. Less vile is not so bad.
Musk’s X, though, is a dungeon of hate indefinitely. That’s a shame, because it used to be something. It used to be a place I couldn’t wait to check out and see what was being said, but it died during this latest election.
Election night is what killed it. Think of it this way: One less place that receives my opinions.