X
Out of context: Reply #104
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- neverscared0
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has made mistake after mistake. His latest decision proves that he has never understood the average Twitter user—or doesn’t care to build a platform for them.
SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, software developer Jeremy Vaught created the Twitter handle @music to curate news and share stories about, obviously, music. Tens of thousands of Tweets later, he’d built a following of more than 11 million. Then, last week, Twitter—now rebranded as X—took the handle off him. An email from X, which Vaught posted to the platform, offered him no explanation but told him he could choose one of three other handles: @music123, @musicmusic, or @musiclover. All three were held by other users and so would presumably have to have been taken off them.
“It feels like this would be this forever thing where somebody's got their account taken and they were allowed to go take another one,” Vaught says. "Where would we end up? That'd be crazy."
He has since been assigned @musicfan.
The confiscation is entirely within X’s terms of service. As the company tries to turn itself into an everything app, from music to video to finance, it’s likely it will need to stake a claim to handles related to its new business lines. But unilaterally taking a popular handle off a user could be bad business and another demonstration of how X under Musk is stripping away the things that made Twitter, Twitter.
“I definitely think that it gives pause to building any sort of a brand on there,” Vaught says. "When you can't have any confidence that what you're working on is not just going to be taken away, that's huge."
The platform’s success was built on people, like Vaught, doing the work to build followings and create organic communities around shared interests. Heavy-handed land grabs on top of surging hate speech, shifting policies on verification, and, of course, the dropping of a globally recognized brand in favor of a letter, reinforce the feeling that Twitter is more and more becoming a place catering to a usership of one: Musk himself.
- they transferred all his followers and posts to his new handle, so it sucks and its a duck move, but it doesnt change anything for himben98
- They coulda thrown him a few bucks, at the very leastGnash
- All going to plan. This is wonderful progress.monospaced