I Wasted an Hour on X

Recently John Gruber, whom I’ve followed for decades, published X Once Again Marks the Spot. It’s short and I’m not going to try to summarize it so go read it if you haven’t already. But here are two key quotes: “I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is.” and “The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place.” Reaction on Bluesky and the Fediverse has been pretty fierce.

I think the following things can all be true.

It’s less toxic than it used to be · Well yeah, Elon isn’t in everyone’s feed, clearly a major quality-of-life improvement.

It’s still his shop, and he’s a slimy fascist · Go read X is bad, though by Lex Freidman. I mean, Musk delivers sieg-heil Nazi salutes in public and boasted about how he, the world’s richest man, cut off food rations to the world’s poorest children. Lex has a longer list of reasons but those two are all I need.

Then there’s the unforgiveable doctrine of tuning the algorithm to bury posts that have links in them.

The CEOs are there · This was Gruber’s starting point. But, uh… CEOs are boring. They have to be ruthlessly on-message and never stray a millimeter from their core mission, which is promoting their company to the investment class. If I want to learn about Apple I’ll go read actual humans like Gruber or Friedman and ignore the vacuous arm-waving from the executives.

It’s not just CEOs, I saw Macron and Burnham and Zelenskyy and Modi. In fact, today’s reality on X is that the people posting are mostly public figures, already established as writers or politicians or executives or whatever. Most of them are there with a business or party or product to promote and that’s what they do.

There are very few who are just interesting voices you haven’t heard before; and that’s part of what I go online looking for.

It’s not “cheerful” for everyone · I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out. Putinist propaganda. Zionist settler hasbara. Rod Dreher ranting incomprehensibly, and I quote: “…young Jews became Bolsheviks in part to "murder" their fathers - that is, to destroy Judaism.” LLM cheerleading, that get-on-board-or-you’re-history flavor we all remember from the heydey of crypto. Joni Mitchell gleeful at her US-Citizenship ceremony. Slanted political propaganda, against the incumbents in the current BC election, until I switched to Explore and it switched to pro-incumbent puffery.

This is fun?

Anyhow, here’s a list · People, I mean, who are there but should really know better and of whom I now think less: Joni. Nicholas Kristoff. Josh Marshall. Jeet Heer. Nate Silver. Aaron Rupar. Corey Quinn. Stephen King. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation. Miguel de Icaza. Fortunately none of them care what I think of them. I could go on but I’m already blue enough. And I’m not going to even start listing the many featured voices belonging to people whom I already thought of as unsalvageable scumfucks.

The future · Twitter is part of the SpaceX LLMs+rockets conglomerate. If you believe, as I do, that the bubble is going to pop soon and loudly, it’s going to be desperate times when SpaceX’s valuation collapses and it can’t borrow billions to keep the doors open. Twitter has never made really significant profits (and I saw exactly zero ads in the hour I spent poking around).

So what happens then? Feels to me like the choices are extinction or enshittification. We’ll see.

Where I stand · I’m still a happy Fediversian, here’s why. Yeah, there aren’t as many people and it’s kinda geeky and leftist and queer; also unattractive to billionaires and CEOs. I can see why that’s less appealing for some folk out there and, well, OK. But I’m having fun on Fedi. And it’ll be a loooong time before I waste another hour on X.