Musk changing Twitter to X is birdbrained and unbearably cringe

Elon Musk has dumped the Twitter logo. Photo / Herald montage, AP, Getty Images

Twitter has never been more uncool than what it is right now. I know, I know. The social network hasn’t been cool for years. But this week it reached previously unthinkable levels of uncool. In fact, Twitter sprinted right past the line of uncool, tripped on its own shoelaces and fell face-first into a brave new world of extreme cringe.

It’s now embarrassing to admit to being on Twitter. Which is not ideal for a network based on social connectivity. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s a good thing that Twitter is officially dead.

Yes, the latest big-brained move from Twitter owner Elon Musk was to kill the bird he spent a massive $44 billion overpaying for less than two years ago.

In an ironic hat-tip to the service that it used to provide to its users, the news of its demise broke on the social network itself. Musk tweeted that he’d decided the globally recognised brand of Twitter would now be known as the meaningless letter X. The obvious question was why?

Like all of Musk’s leadership decisions at Twitter, sorry X, it was met with amused bewilderment by fools like me who are still kicking around on Twitter. It also ushered in plenty of head-scratching. What would tweets be called? What about retweets? Would we really have to say “Follow me on X”?

The answers were as well thought out as Musk’s spur-of-the-moment rebranding decision. Tweets would now be called - and I swear I am not making this up - a Xeet.

A Xeet! A Xeet sounds like a creature you’d meet, with fluffy blue fur and extra large feet, in a Dr Seuss book that was all about Xeets.

Elon Musk's social media account on X.com, formerly known as Twitter. Photo / Alex Robertson

Presumably, this also means a retweet is now a rexeet. As I am still on the platform I guess I use X. An admission that would have a) got me arrested back when the party drug ecstasy was abbreviated to X or b) laughed at by my peers for using such painfully unhip slang.

That this is how Twitter dies is a cruel blow. Facebook has groups and your parents. Instagram has pretty photos. But Twitter had words. It was a platform for people that liked reading and writing. You had to rely on your wits, not the filter settings on your phone, to get any sort of engagement.

Of course, it wasn’t all roses and wordplay. The Trump era turned a lot of those words into hate speech which resulted in a lot of people shouting at each other and the first mass migration. Twitter may have introduced the word “tweet” to the lexicon but it was also responsible for the rise of doom scrolling. With Twitter morphing into an outrage machine, filling your eyes with awful news and bad vibes at every opportunity, it began losing users like it was going out of fashion.

Which, it quite literally was.

But despite this Twitter held on. And then Musk bought it.

That it took this long to unravel is surprising considering how consistent Musk has been at introducing and implementing his dumb ideas. He scared away all the advertisers with his promotion of extreme-right accounts and the site’s functionality and user safety are almost non-existent because he fired almost 80 per cent of its staff. The safety aspect is especially concerning as only a few weeks ago the site was flooded with animal cruelty videos that weren’t being flagged, blurred or removed.

Twitter's new look, as teased in a post by owner Elon Musk. Image / Twitter

He introduced a monthly subscription fee that costs more than a subscription to Amazon Prime Video, argued with Stephen King about it and then brute forced these paying users’ tweets into everybody’s timeline.

Then there was the whole blue tick fiasco. This saw Musk turning the site’s verified symbol which allowed you to confidently know that people were who they said they were into nothing more than a subscriber signifier. Anyone can now impersonate anyone or anything they choose and you can’t really tell who is who.

With all this going down many news orgs, power users and high-profile accounts all left. It’s a sad state of affairs. Although one that’s not without schadenfreude. There is a particular joy in watching the world’s richest man constantly prove he’s also one of the stupidest with his woeful leadership and gawd-awful ideas.

The funniest/saddest part of all this is that Musk genuinely believes that X is a cool name. He’s been obsessed with calling something X since the 90s. This was a large part of why he got booted out of PayPal. In the 90s, many unextreme things were labelled X-treme, like rollerblades and soft drinks, and Musk clearly still believes the hype all these decades later. No matter that in the context of a social media site X is completely meaningless and nonsensical.

It’s also more cringe than both seasons of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom The Office combined. Of all the birdbrained decisions Musk has made since taking over, this is his greatest. Twitter was already on fire. Now it’s been burnt to an X.