Yeah, so… I deleted my twitter account.
I know, no one really cares. If you want to follow me now, go to my Mastodon account. But this post isn’t really about that.
I created my Twitter account in 2008. A bunch of folks I worked with at Corpedia did and I joined them to keep in touch. Some of the people I worked with knew others at Twitter at the time too, so I got to learn a bit about what was going on. Twitter’s first tech stack was written in Ruby. At Corpedia, we were moving from a VB.NET eLearning LMS to Ruby. So it was nice to see others with their advice.
Over the years I got to like Twitter. It was a reasonable way to not only keep in touch with folks, but also to get news that was ‘in progress’. When I was younger, I had played with shortwave radio and hearing what’s going on around the world on Twitter kinda reminded me of those times. Of course, the barrier to entry on shortwave was much higher than Twitter. So… there was some noise on Twitter. Turns out there was a lot.
Over the years Twitter grew and fixed lots of hard technical problems. They also tried to mitigate some really hard society problems as well. The trolls, disinformation, and harassment was huge. Little by little Twitter became a platform for advertisements and content moderation was needed to keep the ad money flowing. Twitter became better in some ways, and worse in others. By the time Musk bought Twitter, Twitter had gotten some balance between its audience and its advertisers. And least we forget the Musk is famous for not advertising Tesla. The reason? He gets free advertisement every time he uses Twitter. Twitter has been his marketing department for years.
I won’t rehash all the dumb shit Musk is doing. But it’s worth pointing out that of all people, Musk got so much out of Twitter over the years. Now he’s just breaking his toys. The Twitter employees who built Twitter are being treated like garbage. H1B visas that help build the platform that literally is Tesla’s advertisement wing are forced to work overtime else risk being deported from the USA if they lose their jobs.
I really feel bad for the people who built Twitter. Years of work torn to shreds in weeks. And all for some ego’s fantasy.