There's a tweet from former President Donald Trump I think about a lot. It is ?????? ????? ??????unintentionally hilarious and indicative of how the human experience works.
A dozen years ago he posted: "The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage."
Say what you want about the man — perhaps that he's a race-baiting compulsive liar who's hell-bent on subverting long-held democratic norms — but that's a great tweet. It's perhaps the gilded billionaire's most relatable moment: This thing sucks and of course I'm going to keep doing it. Most of us feel that way each morning as we rise for work.
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Funnily enough, that Trump tweet is almost exactly how I feel about Elon Musk's X, the website formerly known as Twitter. Yes, it's awful. It has degraded in myriad ways, actively incentivizes the worst accounts, and has lost lots of the best users. But there is no real replacement and I've been using it for too long to change now.
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Previously I wrote that the best alternative to Twitter is Logging Off. In the piece I noted that Twitter had become markedly less fun, worse to use, and that the rip-offs — Threads, Blue Sky, etc. — didn't have the user-base or familiarity to scratch the same itch. I stand by all that. The best thing alternative to Elon Musk's X is to log off — I am just unable to do it.
Lots of folks have left X. Anecdotally, I've seen a bunch, especially among the folks who don't really need it. Frequent posters I used to follow like screenwriter Brian Koppelman, songwriter Jason Isbell, and sitcom guru/baseball guy/Mose fromThe OfficeMike Schur have all left, for instance. Mashable's reporting noted that X lost daily active users after an initial post-Musk surge then stagnated over the summer. Some studies have shown a steep drop in Twitter use pretty much since Musk took over. In short, people are ditching X.
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But, queue the Leo in Wolf of Wall Street meme, I'm not freaking leaving. Let's be clear: This is not some show of support of Musk or his platform. I get all the reasons X sucks now. I can hardly scroll without seeing some ad for drop-shipped crap, a promoted post by some scammer, or a flood of replies from verified bots. And Musk, well, he's actively a rightwing shitposter remaking X in that image. He bans the people he doesn't like, yet reinstates far-right accounts that got barred for misinformation, abuse, or worse...all under the guise of loving free speech.
I should leave X. It's the right thing to do and would be a healthy choice. And from a purely practical perspective, the site sucks now. But let's be honest here, I'm lazy and I love posting. Sure, TikTok is an interesting and addictive platform, and Instagram is...fine I guess, but my formative social media years centered on Twitter and text-based jokes. It's not something I want to give up. At least not yet.
X is the rotting corpse of a website I once loved, but at least its limbs and appendages are familiar. The muscle memory remains. I know exactly where X's app is on my phone's home screen, I know exactly how to compose a tweet, I can bop over to my replies without thinking, as if breathing. My follower list is curated, as is my following, even if my engagement is nonexistent due to not paying Elon $8 per month for a check. Were it not for the inertia of its previous existence as Twitter, X would be nothing but Truth Social. But inertia is a hell of a force.
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I've had this thought about not leaving Twitter — sorry, I mean X — for quite some time. But a tweet helped inspire me to finally write it. User @pankendev posted: "'if you hate elon so much then why are you still here' BECAUSE I WAS HERE FIRST. WHY SHOULD I LEAVE. HE'S THE ONE WHO SUCKS."
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And you know what, they're kind of right. Sure, Musk sucks, but it doesn't mean I can't use the decaying remnants of Twitter to enjoy what I can. For instance, the day less-than-beloved New York City Mayor Eric Adams got indicted was hilarious, especially as an NYC resident. I shouldn't have to miss that because a thin-skinned billionaire has decided to gut his favorite website. Also, I write about the internet for Mashable, meaning I can't fully leave X anyway — not that I'd actually be able to quit cold turkey.
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X is a sinking ship. But I just cannot seem to find my way to the life rafts. None of X's clones have come close to matching what Twitter once was and, thus, I'm left hanging onto the debris that remains.
Elon Musk's X is awful but that's OK — I'll keep logging onto that garbage. At least until I can log off for good.