This is the debut edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the new GQ columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
Twitter is better than it has ever been.
Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022 after months of well-publicized drama and legal issues, is a confirmed bozo. The overgrown Tommy Pickles is best known for inventing an electric car that people made their personalities, trying to go to space, having a child named X Æ A-12 with musician Grimes, and of course, founding PayPal.
Since his big purchase, he has made several interesting (and highly public) business decisions. It has been reported that he has slashed staff by about 80%, closed several offices, stopped paying bills, and of course, he gave former President Donald Trump his account back. Even if you are not a Twitter power user like me, you can imagine these extreme measures have caused some issues with the platform. But TBH, shockingly, nothing catastrophic.
Every morning, I open the app and find interesting things to read, jokes to laugh at, and takes to make me angry. The introduction of the “For You” feed—an algorithmically-powered stream of popular tweets, tailored to each user’s online bubble—polarized my timeline but has consistently exposed me to some of the most hilarious stuff I have seen on the app in years. If you use Twitter as God intended—for the jokes—you are handsomely rewarded. Not every tweet is a home run, but it is very easy to ignore the garbage and keep scrolling. The overly sanctimonious users whose feeds keep surfacing the triggering content that they can’t resist interacting with are the only ones suffering.
As Elon’s reign has continued, there have been some hiccups: losing my blue check was a short-lived ego bruise, the “rate limit exceeded” debacle (in which non-paying users were only allowed to see 600 tweets per day) affected me for about 24 hours, and previews not loading in iMessage negatively impacted my group chat performance. These were short-lived, minor annoyances. Bonehead moves that were quickly corrected or forgotten.
Challengers have rushed in to court Twitter’s alienated superusers. But none of the first wave of these platforms seem destined to amass the scale or capture the messy spirit of the original. Mastodon seems aimed at Burning Man-brained software engineers, Bluesky is for shitposters wanting to port their act to the most Twitter-like alternative, and Post.news was such a blip I didn’t even take the time to profile its users.
Enter Threads.
The newly-birthed Twitter competitor launched by Meta and gleefully promoted by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is inspiring lofty descriptions like this one from AdAge: “a phenomenon pulsing with a rare vibe of optimism and a vision of possibilities that’s reminiscent of the internet’s early days.” Even comedian Dane Cook weighed in, jamming the phrases “healing foundation,” “slice of utopia” and “pal’round” into a single post. I have to laugh at the drama of these statements. Threads is, uh, a bad facsimile of Twitter owned by yet another familiar tech billionaire—this one known for Jiu-Jitsu wrestling and overusing zinc-oxide sunblock on his face instead of fantasizing about Mars and having lots of kids.
Chris Black
Source link
