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The call’s coming from inside the house.
It’s a terrifying line from anequally terrifying 1979 horror movie.
A day later I wrote about how I worried thatTwitter might not survive Elon Musk.
In a way, I was 100% correct.Twitter no longer exists, long live “X”.
The iconic brand name change is emblematic of the slipshod and haphazard way in which Musk implements his non-strategy.
The platform changes not just on a whim, but always on Musk’s whim.
Two of X’s most recent changes are near-perfect examples.
For what it’s worth, verified accounts are necessarily a measure of identity truth.
Musk’s other big recent change was tostrip away visible links from shared content.
Now tweets feature the text and an image.
There’s no indication that clicking on the image will take you to an article.
It’s likely destroying engagement and is certainly hurting the mainstream media Musk hates.
It could be hurting advertisers and promoted tweets that hope to engage people with classic blue links.
Musk’s reason for doing it?
He didn’t like how the links looked.
A business strategy like this is the equivalent of a busy signal.
And so he digs away, destabilizing the foundation to the point of destruction.
Recently, I asked X users if they thought the platform would survive into next year.
Not even half of the respondents in my unscientific poll believe it will.
More than a quarter checked “WTF is X?”
And that’s part of it, isn’t it?
Musk, though, wants no part of that past.
He has loftier aspirations for the flailing platform.
X is nothing and everything.
Musk wants it to be, if anything, a broadcast web link for the world.
See how hard he pushes full-length andlive video.
More broadly speaking, X has a fundamental and growing engagement problem.
It also just doesn’t feel good to Tweet in the way it used to.
There is almost no joy in sharing on the platform.
