 Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has gotten so much worse for a number of reasons. Hate speech is rampant, trolls are emboldened, celebrity accounts are falling victim to phishing scams, and basic functionality isn't even an expectation for most users at this point given how frequent outages are. And none of this is surprising, at least with regard to basic functionality considering that Elon Musk fired so many crucial engineers. But, as bad as things are now, they're about to get much worse because Twitter is rolling out new changes in April, and like all previous changes that Elon Musk has announced, well it seems like nobody is satisfied with these changes. On March 23rd, the official Twitter verified account announced that all legacy verified checkmarks will be removed unless you pay Ellen $8 a month. And apparently he didn't learn anything from the last verification debacle because this is going to create a system where abuse is rampant. As Monica Lewinsky points out, there are multiple users impersonating her currently, and one of them is even verified. She adds, In what universe is it fair to people who can suffer consequences for being impersonated? A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth even gets out the door, and she is exactly correct about that. I mean, what is the point of verification at this point other than to tell the world that you are embarrassingly paying for a website that's free? Because it's not to verify identities, because the goal of verification, or so I thought anyways, was to reduce the amount of people impersonating public figures and people of interest. But I mean if that's not the case, if it's a clout thing, and normies want checkmarks too, that's fine, I have no problem with that. Extend verification to anyone who's able to confirm their identity using a phone number or something, and voila. But you see, it's not about verifying accounts and reducing trolls or bots, it never has been. It's about Ellen making back the money that he lost by overpaying for Twitter. But it unsurprisingly gets worse because Ellen announced the worst change yet. Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in 4U recommendations. This is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bots' worms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls will require verification for same reason. Okay, this is idiotic for so many reasons. Because first of all, Twitter never limited what you see based on who you follow. So to implement this change means you are fundamentally changing what Twitter is. And it puts everyone into more of an echo chamber, which I think is really bad. Second of all, if he's trying to make money by coercing everyone into paying him $8 a month, that's just not the best way to do it considering other social media websites they've found a way to be profitable. They use algorithms to boost engagement and keep people on the platforms for as long as they possibly can, which is enticing to advertisers because eyeballs are what attracts advertisers. So if Ellen forgoes the algorithm for the overwhelming majority of users who refuse to pay and just shows them the people who they're already following, that's going to likely reduce the overall engagement across the board. And people won't be on Twitter for as long, which could in turn devalue ads even more, which is a problem for a platform that is hemorrhaging advertiser dollars. But after seeing how poorly this announcement was received, he backtracked in true Ellen fashion, writing, forgot to mention that accounts you follow directly will also be in for you since you have explicitly asked for them. Like I genuinely cannot understand what he's doing here. Nobody can, even him. Now I've referenced how trolls have been emboldened earlier in this video and when you consider how the algorithm is seemingly boosting motherfuckers who pay for Twitter and you look at who's buying these accounts, then you kind of begin to see why the platform has gotten much worse. In an article from Mashable, Matt Bender explains, researcher Travis Brown who has been tracking Twitter blue subscriptions since January recently revealed around half of all Twitter users subscribed to Twitter blue have less than 1,000 followers. That's approximately 220,132 paying subscribers. Furthermore, 78,059 paying Twitter blue subscribers have less than 100 users following their account. That's 17.6% of all Twitter blue subscribers. Breaking down follower accounts even further, there are 2,270 paying Twitter blue subscribers who have zero followers. That's a significant chunk of Twitter blue subscribers being unable to crack even four digits worth of followers even though some have subscribed believing it would help boost the growth of their Twitter account. According to this data, Twitter blue currently has a total of 444,435 paying subscribers. Accounting for the limitations of pulling this data using the Twitter API, Brown tells Mashable that he estimates that Twitter likely has around 475,000 paying subscribers. So, yeah. And I might add based on my unscientific observation, mind you, that most of these paid Twitter users seem to be right-wingers and or Ellen Dick writers and even with them seemingly being boosted in the algorithm, still, nobody wants to follow them. Thus, the overall Twitter experience will only continue to get worse if we're all seeing paid users over people who we actually want to see. And this is really sad because the days where we discover new people who were not already following are numbered and we're only going to learn about new voices on Twitter who we're interested in learning about if one of the people we're already following happens to retweet them. So overall discoverability of new voices on the platform is going to be limited because of this change. And that doesn't even take into consideration the most petulant and downright bizarre changes that Ellen has made to the platform since taking it over. Not only is the algorithm boosting him after he cried to Twitter's engineers about Biden's Super Bowl post getting more engagement than his, but as Insider reports, 35 seemingly random VIP users are being boosted by the algorithm and this includes LeBron James, Ben Shapiro, AOC and fucking Cat Turd 2. It's just so weird and I can't help but ask, why? Nobody knows why anything works the way that it does on Twitter including Elon Musk. None of it makes sense and also he's boosting right-wing propagandists but simultaneously elevating AOC's posts who he has fought with. It just, none of it makes sense. None of it makes sense. So in conclusion, Elon Musk is a fucking moron and any sim who mistakenly thought that he was uniquely brilliant because he has money is learning the hard way that meritocracy is a myth. Money does not, contrary to popular belief, increase a person's inherent value and it sure as shit doesn't mean someone's a genius. So in a way, I kind of appreciate Elon Musk educating the masses about the hubris and dumb fuckery of elites because no, Elon Musk is not a genius and he never was. Thank you.