There are people who like Elon Musk to the point of depravity, and there’s not much to do about that. I don’t bother writing about him because generally speaking, he doesn’t cross over into my world very often. Every company he has been involved in has not really added value to me – from PayPal to Tesla and now to Twitter.
When he took over Twitter – a platform I generally use only to track live events from sources I trust – I wasn’t worried. Most of these sources aren’t ‘verified Twitter’ folks, but people who have been consistently on the money over the years.
The cost of the new Twitter API is something I covered before in the context of WordPress.com, and now it seems the story has finally made it to Mashable in the broader context. It seems a bit late, actually, so I don’t know why it took so long for the story to come out, but come out it did.
$5,000 a month is definitely not a figure for developers, considering the level of transactionality developers are used to. If I were asked to spend that, I’d expect steak dinners every night with a cardiologist on the payroll. Twitter, which was once the Wild West, is being gentrified – which is not a kind use of the word.
Still, it’s something people are routing around, because when things become tough to work with on the Internet, we find ways around it. Since I’m not as vested in Twitter usage, it’s not a big deal for me. Every now and then I tweet something related to what I’m writing, or comment on something that I’m keeping an eye on.
Yet the way it is being handled is… poor. Some folks are finding out about things the hard way. This (borrowed from Mashable’s work, so props to them) is a pretty bad way to find something out.
It’s not often a social media company becomes outright hostile to it’s users – the ones who did find value in Twitter. People are moving to Telegram and other platforms.
Personally, I think Twitter was on a decent path until Musk decided to be the Dictator-of-Twits, but I had misgivings on the trolling amongst other things – and I think trusted sources mean something other than what was happening and what is happening now.
However you feel about it, it’s a matter of what works for you. Yet a lot of popular content won’t be on Twitter anymore, and that creates new problems for keeping track of whose content you like. I can’t even make a suggestion on it, because some go here, some go there…
For the record, I don’t like any of the social media platforms presently for this, largely because of an account bias: Accounts can become popular but content that is worthwhile isn’t necessarily the best in some instances.
