this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 month ago

Don't call it anything. Ignore it and maybe it will go away.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I mean, it’s not like twitter was ever a beacon of glory, pre-Elon twitter was still twitter

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Twitter was a turd. X is a turd marinaded in diarrhea sauce.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Such poetry. It brings a tear to my eye

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Ok well maybe a beacon of glory is a bit out there for Twitter, but there was a time where it was actually cool and unique.

Like back in the day where you could interact with it over plain SMS lol

I feel old.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

My poor parents phone bill when I started using Twitter over SMS...

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Xitter (pronounced shitter)

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (10 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sorry twitter was always trash

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

It really is saying something that it's waaay worse now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago

There is simple solution: just ignore it. Don't refer to it in any way.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It's not like it was a hostile take over. They played their part when Musk talked shit and they sued him to follow through with the purchase. They could have easily kept it, but they wanted the money instead.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Not that they are blameless - far from it - but they had a fiduciary responsibility to pursue the deal because it was good for their shareholders

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (6 children)

"Fiduciary duty to get profit" is a libertarian myth. It has no legal basis.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

It’s a myth so widely pushed and accepted over the decades that just calling it a myth won’t be accepted as an argument against it at this point.

What I think is interesting is that this sense of fiduciary duty can be used by a company to do whatever they want. Mass layoffs are part of a fiduciary duty to cut costs. Mass hirings are part of a fiduciary duty to expand operations for growth. At this point it’s less a myth and more an excuse for doing whatever.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Twitter has never, even dating back to it's inception, never ever ever turned a profit. The whole reason Elon mockingly offered to buy it was because they were looking for, and struggling to find, a buyer. They just wanted to break even and walk away.

Instead Elon was like "Hur dur I got 43 billion for ya!" And Twitter was like "SOLD! No takesies backsies!". And Elon was like "Wait, wut?"

And then Elon carried a sink through the lobby in protest.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It was a public company, the shareholders would've sued them, no?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

OP might be talking about the user base, not the owners.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Hey, don't rewrite history - twitter was always notoriously bad, under Elon it surely got even worse though.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (5 children)

For me, it’s simpler than that: I’m gonna deadname his company as long as he keeps deadnaming his daughter

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

People now have fond memories of twitter? Insane.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But Twitter has always been shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not really. It was fun to talk to people that you barely knew. It was kinda like a hybrid of a chatroom and a forum.

But it grew to become shit.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

They have $44 billion dollar bills to wipe away the tears.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't understand why anyone would care this much about a social media website

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Those people sold it to musk. They were tech bros whose goal from the start was to get a massive buyout and bail. They don't deserve your respect anymore than musk does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The way I look at it, if Elon Musk is gonna deadname his own child, I'm sure as shit gonna deadname the corporation he tanked

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

The following is a tremendously disproportionate analogy given that we're talking about a microblogging website, but I really don't think there's any better term for it:

It's really less like you're calling Twitter by its deadname and more like you're refusing to call it by its slave name. Twitter didn't come up with this on its own, some guy just rolled up and said "I'm changing your name because yours isn't cool enough." Like, fukken Kunta Kinte.

Again, very unfortunate that that's the only comparison that comes to mind but I'm really blanking on anything else. Jean Valjean, I guess. Maybe Darth Vader. Locutus of Borg.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Previously, it was a shithole.
Now, it's a Nazi shithole.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I mean, what you personally call it isn't really going to make any difference, so if we're trying to optimize your mental health, just reframe the naritive in your head. You're still calling it Twitter to honor what it used to be, back when you respected it. You are refusing to acknowledge the nazi dumpster fire it has become, even if you still need to talk about it.

I personally basically never have a reason to mention the site when taking to another person, but if/when I do, I'll call it Twitter just because I think it would annoy Elon, if he somehow knew.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

We should call it "X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter." Every time. Yes it sounds ridiculous, because it is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

"X" in Chinese is pronounced "sh", so I approve.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Twitter is gone. It died the day Elon fired most of its staff.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

  1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

  1. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

  2. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of 'content' from every which way, which just became the norm for 'social media' design.

Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a 'place' with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god's sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship... and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I am with you on almost all this, but I'm not sure about this:

a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

Don't you remember the many-part tweets? Super common and all but admitting how fucking moronic the character limit was. The character limit alone made Twitter a huge piece of shit that I always hated. And I'm with you that it never made anything better. People argued for years that Twitter was good specifically because of that limit. I never understood that argument in the least.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I mean lets not overdo it the algorithms were becoming very trash before it was bought up but it was usable. Peak twitter was like 2017

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Twitter was no better than x lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I hadn't been there in a long while, but a friend sent a link to what he said was a funny tweet. It was, but the responses were just awful, and they all had blue checkmarks.

Every single inserted ad was for right-wing grifts (crypto, t-shirts, gold coins, etc) or awful right-wing politicians looking angry or posing with guns.

Noped right out.

I pointed it out to my wife, but she says the journalists she follows are still all there. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I like xitter… which someone told me was pronounced “shitter”. Seems right.

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