Just hours after introducing a new gray “official” check mark that is distinct from the blue verification checkmark now for sale, Elon Musk’s Twitter announced that the project has been shut down.
The Wall Street Journal reports Elon Musk has already dumped the newly introduced “official” checkmark just hours after rolling out the feature. Hours after Twitter launched the label designed to verify the authenticity of a user’s account (which is supposedly what the original Twitter verified checkmarks were designed for), Musk announced he was shutting down the project.
I just killed it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022
Musk tweeted “I just killed it” in response to a tweet from tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee. Instead, Musk referred to Twitter Blue, the platform’s new subscription program that provides blue check marks and other perks for $7.99. Musk says the blue check mark will be “the great leveler.”
Musk previously warned that the company would “do lots of dumb things in coming months,” adding: “We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”
Current Twitter insiders say that the recent staffing cuts have left remaining employees unable to sustain the platform and explain how they believe the platform will break in the coming weeks. One engineer commented, “If we’re going to be pushing at a breakneck pace, then things will break. There’s no way around that.”
One engineer currently working at Twitter who is worried about the platform following the layoff of half of the company’s employees commented: “Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off… It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability.”
The engineer believes that these issues will continue and multiply as time goes on, partly due to the remaining staff tasked with fixing these issues burning out over time. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he said.
The engineer said that this will take some time, but that the telltale signs of larger platform instability are already visible. The engineer says that the degradation will start with small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using; whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.”
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
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