just burning down my twttr

It was a shit-show on Twitter this weekend.

Things are going swell over at Twitter dot com. Elon Musk announced earlier this month that verified users would lose their blue checkmark on 4/20 (hardy-har-har). Journalists, authors, and Twitter power users like @dril must now subscribe to Twitter Blue to keep the verification badge. Except, anyone with $8 and a phone number can get one too, muddying the purpose of verification.

Elon likely had hoped the "Twitter elite" would rush to buy back their blue checkmark after they lost it. That didn't happen. One estimate showed Twitter Blue gained a net of just 28 subscribers in the 24 hours following the checkmark purge. Let that sink in.

The tepid response sure seemed to make the twit-in-chief nervous as he started paying out of his pocket Twitter Blue subscriptions for some high-profile critics of the service and his leadership. Horror novelist Stephen King, basketball great LeBron James, and the undisputed champ of shit posting, dril, all inexplicably got their blue checkmarks back this weekend. King immediately renounced the stain beside his name, informing his followers that he did not pay for Twitter Blue. Dril kept changing his profile name, automatically removing the verification badge each time. Twitter then locked dril's account, leaving him with the name "Slave to Woke" for the foreseeable future.

By late Saturday, every account with over 1 million followers appeared to have their verification badges again—everyone except the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey (he finally got his back on Sunday). Elon and Jack haven't seen eye to eye about the changes recently at Twitter and Elon, predictably, is being a baby about it. Not that it matters too much to Jack. He seems content promoting his new social media platforms, Nostr and BlueSky. Meanwhile, Elon is trolling his critics by forcing verification badges on them.

Many users are actively blocking Twitter Blue subscribers which has hurt a lot of feelings. Twitter Blue subscriber Matthew Coast compared the blue checkmark blocking to the holocaust, tweeting, “All the people going ‘I know who the baddies are, they have blue checkmarks’ are basically going, ‘I know who the Jews are, they have stars of David.” yikes yikes yikes yikes. Musk later suspended Blocktheblue, an account dedicated to blocking anyone who purchased a checkmark via Twitter Blue.

The first product under Musk's leadership is so wildly hated that even subsidized from his own pocket, that little blue checkmark is nothing any respectable Twitter user wants to be associated with. Oh, the times, they are changing. Twitter is dying fast. For the record, I think that's a bad thing. Revolutions have been organized on this website. But, if it must go, I hope dril figures out how to put the final nail in the coffin— the greatest poster of our time defeats the richest reply-guy dickhead.