A Tale of Two Birds
It was the best of sites. It was the worst of sites.
“I had the four best years of my life there”, a friend told me about Twitter as I watched all of my tweets being deleted. I pasted a couple of lines of code that I copied from GitHub on the console and hit enter. One by one, I saw hundreds and thousands of words that I wrote on different computers and smartphones since late 2007 going into oblivion, never to be read by anyone ever again. I recognized some, chuckled and cringed to others, but most were just inane. They just didn’t make any sense anymore. Spur of the moment things or just me whining about public transport, my job or whatever was bothering me that particular day.
As the script ran, I started to remiss about my years in the hell hole we all came to know as Twitter. I joined in late 2007, or early 2008. My memory gets fuzzy sometimes. Anyway, it was the dying days of Orkut, the once omnipresent social network that dominated Brazil’s webscape. I worked at a recording studio at the time and had way too much time on my hands. My then undiagnosed ADHDer and drummer extraordinaire boss convinced me to join. Years passed and I passed through the endless good morning posts, #FollowFridays, countless whales, #citizenjournalism and God know how many other trends, memes and craziness that happened every day on the app. You could open the app and for no good reason every single one of your friends decided to post their nudes on your feed.
During the pandemic it was my only contact with the outside world. Instagram was too toxic, too full of positivity and people believing that we would overcome it all and become better people in the end. On Twitter, things remained more grounded. It was the real world. A place where we tried to remain ourselves as the world descended into madness.
As for myself, Twitter was always an outlet. A place where I could scream into the void about whatever mild nuisance I had that day. Where I could rant. Where I could gripe.
I made friends there. Some I have never met in my life, but I consider them my friends. They know more about me and are closer to my heart than many of the people I see frequently in my life. I've also had arguments. I've also lost friends there. Twitter was an extension of my life.
And then Elon came along.
I mean, it's not actually his fault. Entirely, that is. Twitter was irredeemably broken since it's inception. As a collective of users, we never knew what do do with it. It made content easy to filter, but was ultimately a place full of self righteous horrible people. Just like the real world.
After Elon came along with that stupid sink, things just got worse and out of hand. The Nazis were always there. The stupidity and misinformation was always there. But even before any changes were implemented, before the name was changed, even before the public likes were taken away, the advertisers left or the reports of mass layoffs or reporters receiving the poo emoji as a reply, the vibes were off. Immediately after the news broke that he had acquired Twitter for an insane amount of money, it started to feel like it wasn't our place anymore.
Many people, like myself still call it Twitter. We refused to accept the name change and the egregious decision that threw away years of brand construction. We still call them "tweets" and don't know how we're supposed to call them now? "Exes"? "Posts"? It feels wrong. Perhaps because we grew with "tweets". Perhaps because we are all in denial that this is no longer our space. It's no longer where we shitpost and gripe. It's no longer our haven where you don't have to be beautiful or successful, where we were free from bad memes and boomers. It's Elon's World now. It's his space to shitpost and spread demented conspiracy theories and we're just there to watch while his minions like whatever idiocy that he's shoveling that particular day.
I came to realize that it wasn't Twitter anymore. It really was X.
As I let that sink in (groan), I decided to delete my account and never look back.
And I felt relieved.
