Twitter seems to be a plaything for Elon Musk these days.

The little bird icon that we had long been familiar with was disestablished out of the blue. The terms “to tweet” and “to retweet” were renamed respectively “to post” and “to repost”. Moreover, the name of the service itself was changed to the tasteless “X”, which made many users’ blood boil.

However, it is by no means the case that Twitter had kept its original settings, functions, and names till Musk appeared.

I first got a Twitter account in May 2007. Back then there were some Japanese members tweeting in English, but I could hardly find the people who tweeted in Japanese.

Few people might know (or remember) this, but at that time they didn't say “to follow”, they said “to add” instead. Like adding the people you’d like to follow to your list.

Though I created an account, I didn’t know who to “add” since there was no one around me tweeting. So, I chose some people at random, added them to my list, and tweeted for the first time without any followers, “I’m hungry”.

There was no reply or reaction. So, it was far from interesting, and I withdrew from it immediately.

It took two years for me to resume Twitter as Mr. Honane of MBS, and right around that time, Twitter started growing at a tremendous rate and the term “to add” was changed to “to follow”.

(For your information, “honane” means “See you later” in the Osaka dialect, and MBS stands for Mainichi Broadcasting System, where I used to work.)

The character limit for Twitter was initially 140 characters for both Japanese and English, but it was said that Japanese, which uses 2-byte characters, can use twice as many bytes as English, and that Japanese can tweet more content thanks to kanji, ideographic characters.

Now the limit for English is expanded to 280 characters, equivalent to 140 characters in Japanese, both consuming 280 bytes.

Since then, not a few things have been modified little by little, such as how to count the number of characters in a long URL (any URL now counts as 23 characters).

Recently, Elon Musk has extended the limit to thousands of characters only for those who pay extra for Twitter Blue. Not that it matters to me.

Another change was that the "favorite" (“okiniiri” in Japanese) button was changed to "like" (“iine” in Japanese), a move that was a blatant rip-off of Facebook.

This was not just a name change especially for us Japanese, due to the difference in nuance between the English and Japanese translations.

“Okiniiri(favorite)” was sort of a memorandum, which means “I'll mark it up a bit.” But “iine(like)” is an obvious message to the tweeter and a statement of goodwill.

In other words, “iine(like) is something for others, while “okiniiri(favorite)” is just for us. It has caused us to be unnecessarily caring.

Many Japanese began to hit the like buttons one after another, even if they were not interested in the tweet, even if they couldn’t understand half of the tweet, only to let the tweeter know how they liked him/her or that they had read the tweet.

Honestly, I'm not too fond of this.

Thus, looking back over its long history, Twitter has been modified over and over again in minor details, including the addition of a voting function and the button to display analytics.

However, they were all modified little by little, incorporating user requests and gauging responses. They did not seem as abrupt and capricious as what Elon Musk has done.

Musk would insist that he had never done anything in an impromptu way and that all of them were a measure to make Twitter a super application.

But obviously, the user's perspective is missing there. This is the major point separating Musk from the former board.

We had never gotten upset with Twitter, which was full of respect for the users and their wishes under the old management. If it had been their decision, there might not have been such resentment against the icon change.

I would normally post these things on X, but I can't write these in 140 characters, and I also seriously worry that if I write something like this, I might suddenly be banned. X is now such a place.

I know that we will never go back to the old setting, but will X really continue to enrich our communication?

I have created a Bluesky account just for the future.