The great calamity of Twitter continues to roll forward but, much to my surprise, it hasn’t actually collapsed into a hole in the ground. I still use it as an information feed, despite the fact it is becoming increasingly difficult to weed out the quality from the noise.
I particularly miss the previous blue-tick service, which highlighted those that had gone through an auditing process to establish their credentials. It wasn’t perfect, working best for big companies, celebrities and publishers who could register a bunch of accounts in one go. By the time I tried to get a blue tick, I discovered that the whole process had essentially been shut down to single applicants.
With the arrival of Mr Musk, the blue tick process has been turned on its head. Now anyone can get one just by paying the monthly subscription fee. Notable organisations decided that they weren’t going to pay a corporate rate for the appropriate coloured tick, and thus this authenticity mark dropped from their accounts. Within a few months, the blue tick went from being a moderately useful authentication signal to being something probably best ignored.
The problem, at least from my perspective, is that Twitter’s noise level has increased significantly. Much of this is down to the recent aggressive insertion of advertising tweets within the main feeds, both into the main feed but also into the middle of discussion threads. Because I use the official Twitter app on my iPhone,
