Smile And Grin At The Change All Around

There's been a lot of talk these last few days about Elon Musk's grudging acquisition of Twitter. If I'm honest, most of it would probably have passed me by if it hadn't been for the occasional, tangentially-related news item popping up on my music feeds and a couple of posts from Belghast and Wilhelm on my blog roll.

I'm gradually learning more about Elon Musk, someone who, in the rare event I ever thought about him at all, I used only to know as "that guy that Grimes had a thing with, once". As for Twitter, other than when I follow links from articles to something someone's said there, my only real connection to the service ended more than a dozen years ago, when I stopped playing Echo Bazaar, the game that went on to become better known as Fallen London.

Failbetter Games, the developers behind that game and its quasi-sequels Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, went with the original and highly annoying idea of requiring a Twitter handle as login credentials. Twitter at the time was fairly new, having been around for something like three years, and I guess some people still thought it was cute. 

Wildstar, then in development, tried to jump the bandwagon by claiming its nascent quest system would be "directly influenced by Twitter". As Carbine's senior narrative designer Cory Herndon put it, "No one likes writing text that doesn’t get read, and getting our players to read what we write is a challenge we take seriously."

As it turned out, wordy quest text was the least of Wildstar's problems and Twitter itself went on to double its maximum Tweet load from the 140 characters Carbine were copying to a bloated 280, although according to a 2018 press release, few took them up on the expansive offer. Apparently most people can say all they want in fewer than forty characters. Would that I were one of them.

My own Twitter history comprises literally nothing other than automated Tweets put out by the aforementioned Echo Bazaar. That was a very annoying thing some games did back then, sending messages to your mother to let her know you'd just earned the title "Goblin Slayer" for killing your five thousandth goblin. I'm assuming no games do that any more, based on how unpopular a feature it used to be.

Regardless of my own lack of interest in using it myself, changes in how Twitter operates do have the potential to affect me indirectly by dint of the bizarre way everyone from the Leader of the Free World (Archaic term; popular in the last century, now only of historic interest except when used ironically.) to my energy suppliers seem to believe tweeting is the exact equivalent of sending a personalised letter. If Elon, as widely anticipated, unleashes the barbarian hordes, signal to noise ratio will degrade for everyone, whether they participate or not.

The post-acquisition trajectory for Twitter is very far from certain, of course. The damn thing has never made money, has it? Actually, yes it has. Twice. "Twitter has posted a net loss every year, except 2018 and 2019 when it made a profit of just over $1 billion." Most of that money comes from advertizing although some comes from "data licensing and services".

As Kanye West has discovered to his enormous cost recently, if you make your brand sufficiently toxic by things you do or say, people no longer want their names associated with yours. It's a fair bet Elon won't make the same kind of statements that have reduced Ye's net worth from $2b (A figure disputed by Ye, who claimed it was double that.) to a mere $400m and startled some of his fans into seeing him as a potential charity case but if, as some anticipate, his ownership shifts the appearance of Twitter to the public eye into something not much more than the in-house journal of the alt-right, there may be some sensitivity to bleed-over in marketing departments around the globe.

One frequently-voiced response to all of this is to withdraw from the fray, either in a scorched earth, delete all social media accounts and buy a fountain pen kind of extreme reaction or a more nuanced and tentative retreat into the more genteel, guarded, often siloed grounds of lesser-known platforms like Mastodon or Hive Social. (No, me neither, until today.)

Much better-known options like Discord, Reddit and even Tik-Tok also come up as possible bolt-holes but really nothing else is anything like Twitter. I know that and I don't even use it.

What seems far more likely to me than any of the already extant services picking up Twitter's slack is the eventual appearance of some entirely new entity that will do to Twitter what Facebook did to MySpace. It's far too easy for people to see existing cultural monoliths as eternal and irreplaceable, when all the evidence suggests they'll be replaced and forgotten with ease. 

I'll be perfectly happy to see Twitter fade but I'm less sanguine about the futures of other services I value more. Blogger, owned and operated as it is by Google, is always at risk but my inspiration for this post was a change to another Google service that's a lot further up the megacorp's attention scale: YouTube.

As I've made plain many times, I use YouTube a lot. It's my primary source of new music and a strong contributor of factual information and entertainment. I wouldn't have had the nerve to cut Beryl's dog walk light-up necklace to size without first watching a tutorial on YouTube.

I also have a YouTube channel, which I don't use for much, other than some occasional whimsy here on the blog. Until now, that channel has gone by the name of the Google account with which I made it, the tautologous Bhagpuss Bhagpuss. It might sound like a nod to the mighty Duran Duran but it is in fact the highly unimaginitive choice I made a long time ago, when Google briefly decided everyone had to register under their real name and rather than do that I just added a second "Bhagpuss" as my surname, which seemed to suit Google just fine.

Because Google, in common with every tech company, can never leave well enough alone, this morning I received my final notification by email that my new, mandatory "Channel Handle" had been assigned. There is the option to choose one of your own but if, like me, you can't be bothered becauase you don't care, one will be assigned to you. 

I was curious to see what mine was so I clicked through the link to find out. And I was pretty happy with it. That was a surprise.

My handle is now @TheBhagpuss and my YouTube channel is youtube.com/@TheBhagpuss. That, I have to say, is an improvement. I kind of like being The Bhagpuss rather than just plain old Bhagpuss, let alone the somewhat comical "Bhagpuss Bhagpuss".

So, let's take what encouragement we can from this unusual example of an imposed change actually making something better. It can happen! 

Now I just have to remember to use my new handle for... something. That's going to be the hard part.