Why I Hate Twitter Now
Twitter was never excellent and never intrigued me enough to constantly go on it. But now, after Elon bought it, I have despised it so much that I use it almost daily. But the reasons I hate it so much are pretty niche, so I will try my hardest to explain them.
It all started when I wanted to experiment with the Twitter API, as every average developer should. When I looked through the docs, I noticed they were highly cluttered, bloated, and confusing. Now, I am not blaming Elon for this. However, it felt like after the rebrand, he never really touched the public API side of things. Fumbling through the documentation finally led me to some tutorials that I could loosely follow, but whenever I would click links in the tutorial, they did not even work at all... I'm not sure if this is still a thing, but it upset me. After more searching, I come across the daunting reality... the damn price of the Twitter API. It is entirely abysmal to me that they can charge much for the Twitter API and expect hobbyists like me not to be angry. Yes, there is a free API version, but your actions are so limited that they aren't even worth it.
I can't believe I am saying that I can only retrieve 100 posts per month. That is like 3 per day? I really needed some Tweets for a machine learning project that I was doing, so I decided to look for alternatives. There wasn't much apart from doing it myself, so that is the approach I decided to take. I will not bore you with the details because I reverse-engineered the XML requests made on the client and replicated them myself with my own NodeJS package. I could release this myself to the public and save everyone lots of time and money, but I have not yet finished, and it's only possible to receive 25 tweets at a time with any query.
Also, you may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the stupid new rebrand name in this blog (apart from the screenshot above). The reason for this is I despise it with all of the energy I have left in my weak body. Why is it one character long? That makes trying to explain to someone where I found this funny tweet extremely confusing without context. Also, the bird? He was such a cute boy, and he was murdered by the awful corporate mindset of Elon Musk. I will never forgive this crime from him.
Do not get me started with the whole thing that Elon fired 80% of Twitter, but it still works fine. Do I have to be the only person to tell you guys that Twitter is not running fine? It is full of bots that comment on utterly irrelevant content.
Or when you are scrolling on Twitter and see the most vile thing of either a full naked woman or someone getting shot 18 times with absolutely no warning. If I am in public, eating my slice of pizza, and a full nude model jumpscares me on my phone, I am not going to have a good time. Companies like Stake and other gambling websites also capitalize on Twitter by paying lazy creators to slap their logos on videos they stole from others. The funny thing about this is Twitter actually doesn't allow the promotion of gambling on their TOS, but the only thing you can do to stop them is to copyright strike the video/image if you actually own it. Thank you for serving justice, Elon! ❤️
Elon loves to spread the fact that he allows free speech on Twitter. I don't mind free speech; it's a natural right that everyone should enforce. online, and I will show a screenshot. Maybe you guys can pick up on why.
Listen, I have no problem with people criticizing Israel because I am sure I will be doing that in future blogs, but this Twitter account above is blatantly anti-Semitic. Twitter has no problem hosting them on their platform. And just in case you think I am singling out Jew hatred, here's an Anti-Muslim example:
There is a lot more that I would love to say. However, the point of my blog is to have fun yapping and not arguing over political issues (except specifically tagged). I am sure Elon Musk is a great guy in real life and just has fun playing his little Diablo game, tweeting, and going to Mars in his free time. I don't necessarily have an issue with how he likes to take up his time, but some of his decisions worry me...
