Ryan Broderick, writing on his Substack Garbage Day, has some intriguing thoughts on WeChat, Musk and Twitter.

The most recent version of the Twitter logo was designed by three people, built from concentric circles, meant to be read clearly at any size, inspired by the Nike logo. The new X logo is the Unicode character for “𝕏” (U+1D54F), but it also seems like he just grabbed it from an old podcast made by one of his reply guys. Musk also did not check if “X” was trademarked. Nor did he check if the @X account was taken. It was. And the user that once owned it told The Telegraph that it was repossessed this week without any sort of payment. No one at Twitter (I’m going to keep calling it Twitter because I don’t think this will actually last) checked how this would work in other countries, either. For instance, in Japan, one of Twitter’s largest and most important markets, the band X Japan owns the handle @XJapan and the trademark, which is why the @TwitterJP account has to be called “Japan” and use the old Twitter-based handle. Oh, also, apparently, Musk has been trying to name an app “X” since all the way back in his Paypal days.

The unquestionable stupidity of the redesign and its rollout has led many to ask — and attempt an answer at — why this is all happening. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote, “The whole point, from the very beginning, has been to erase the old Twitter and everything it stood for.” And Bloomberg’s Matt Levine wrote, “Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!”

My personal philosophy, with regards to both Musk and, also, everything in life, is that the stupidest, laziest, most embarrassing thing that could have happened probably did. My read on Twitter being clumsily stripped for parts and turned into a vague WeChat clone with a name that sounds like a porn site is that Musk made the mistake that all Twitter power users make. At the height of the pandemic, he became obsessed with the app and assumed that it was, one, popular and mattered, and, two, that his experience of it was universal. And so, the answer to “why is he turning Twitter in WeChat” is because he simply cannot imagine an internet beyond Twitter, just like all the users still using it currently. He wants his own WeChat because he wants to control all of human life both on Earth and beyond and he can’t conceive of other websites mattering more than Twitter because Twitter makes him feel good when he posts memes. As far as I’m concerned, Musk is simply doing the billionaire equivalent of when someone breathlessly explains insular Twitter drama at you irl like it’s the news. He thinks Twitter is real life and he’s willing to light as much of his fortune on fire as possible to literally force that to be true. Now matter how cringe it is.

I still stand by my opinion that we are just going to get more, smaller, different Twitters. I mean, TikTok has decided to enter the Twitter wars, announcing this week that they’re launching text posts. And Threads has finally rolled out a version of a chronological tab. And Mastodon is on the rise again. And Bluesky is… well, keep reading, we’ll get to Bluesky. Though, I don’t even think Twitter will even “die” anymore, unless its servers literally go offline. But if you want a point of no return for it ever really “coming back,” I think this is it.

“…smaller, different Twitters” seems about right.