if you saw the title: yes, the X logo is a Unicode character.

Hey everyone, Bit here. We're at it again, talking about social media. Elon Musk is at it again, making changes to X that people aren't very happy with. But this is the most outrage I've EVER seen towards the platform, leading many (including me) to believe that this is the beginning of the fall of 𝕏, formerly Twitter.

Issue 1: Dysfunctional Block Button™

The first issue that people are having with Twitter is that the block button is fundamentally altered.
Usually, when you block someone, you are COMPLETELY INVISIBLE to them. Elon is changing that. Now when you block someone on Twitter, you are no longer completely invisible to the person you blocked. The target of a block can see someone's profile, but they cannot interact with you at all (no following, liking, retweeting, or commenting).

The fundamental issue with this change to the block button is that although it supposedly prevents people from blocking someone to just to harass the block target, it now opens up the block origin to harassment because people who get blocked on social media can sometimes be oddly vindictive.

Musk is gutting X's blocking feature - why this change is dangerous

As X moves ahead with its altered blocking feature, users fear its repercussions on online safety.

https://mashable.com

Issue 2: Forced AI Scrapers

There was also news about changes to Twitter's terms of service, which will remove the option to prevent Grok and xAI from scraping your content, at least outside of Europe. This has especially angered artists, who don't want their work stolen off the web to be used in training AI models.

I agree that companies should either not scrape web content at all, or at least make it where people must consent to their content being scraped into an AI model. There are ways you can prevent art from being used to train AI, such as Glaze and Nightshade, developed by the University of Chicago. Glaze prevents AI from learning from your art, where as Nightshade actively attacks the AI.

X Updates Terms of Service to More Explicitly Cover AI Training Permissions

A new pop-up is alerting users to the update.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com

The Result

The result of this... is that the E𝕏odus is upon us. People are slowly fleeing to other social media apps.

For the general public, most are fixating on Bluesky and Meta Threads. Artists may be looking for apps more suited to them, such as Cara. There are also many more alternatives than that, I've signed up to a lot of them (see littlebit670.link), and I sometimes elaborated on them in other articles here on Paragraph.

If you need a better way to share all of your social media apps, then I recommend gravatar.com. It provides both a link-in-bio as well as a profile picture that can be shared across many websites.

If you're finding fatigue from having to deal with multiple social apps while Twitter is possibly coming to its final stages, I would recommend yup.io, as long as you're not averse to blockchains. Paragraph is also a blockchain app. Both can be signed up to using just an email and password.

Anyway, this has been Bit, and I'll see you next time. Find me everywhere at littlebit670.link.
All companies mentioned are not affiliated with me. All recommendations come from personal experience.