There's no shortage of commentary on Twitter since the chap bought it. (Or rather, was obligated to buy it after he made a single "best and final offer" and then tried to back out when it was accepted? That was the headline from one of the early days, over a year ago. It's been over 400 days, and it feels like the minority have passed without another "headline" in that vein.)

Because he's proven so volatile, I've generally not commented on any "headline," even in a social media reply, before letting it breathe for at least 24 hours – he's volatile enough that that's proven time for a supplemental development or even a full one-eighty – and generally I haven't commented at all. Plus, it's difficult to feel commenting is worthwhile amid so many "Twitter is doomed"s or "Twitter will be broken in a month"s: a conversational stormfront with the feeling of a proverbial equal and opposite reaction to Musk's flailings, and time has shown such declarations haven't come any truer than Musk's initial claims about the potential excellence of the platform beneath him.

Rather, I supposed that while Musk's decisions have mimicked with surprising closeness those of a desperate businessperson so myopically crazed by the bottom line that his ability to exercise the kind of wisdom enabling one to play any kind of long game seemingly doesn't exist, he has few enough of practical skills possessed by his workers to be unilaterally capable of plunging Twitter into a flaming terminus. After all, most every failed, decried, or now-seldom-mentioned platform of the past – LiveJournal, MySpace, Tumblr, AOL, et cetera – still quietly exists and persists in some form.

I may list his "top" few decisions someday, but I thought I'd mention one that I've clearly observed over the past week to ten days, and that's ads: presumably Twitter's main source of income.

Twitter's content is made of vertical lists ("feeds") of tweets, and ads on Twitter, rather than existing in dedicated spaces placed aside those feeds, have always simply been tweets that are promoted through payment. Such tweets are decorated with the word "promoted," gain a small icon, and, like normal tweets, may include images or video. Unlike normal tweets, they're priviliged to appear out of place within feeds, unrelated to the surrounding tweets, so the user is put upon to distinguish them from relevant tweets before deciding how to respond. (One way to respond is to "mute" the account of the advertiser, theoretically preventing the user from seeing any more tweets from them, which remains possible.)

I always found that burden acceptable, understanding that Twitter accounts are free, and believing its value is worth sorting through those momentary interruptions, largely because they were rare enough that I barely thought about them (perhaps once, twice, or a few times a day?), even retaining the strict habit of taking the extra moment to mute them all.

What's been consistent, and different, over the past week is that Twitter has been inserting one ad into all of my feeds for every four tweets. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's the algorithm-heavy "for you" feed (which I avoid), the user-steered "following" feed (where I begin each visit), or even an individual user's fully-controlled profile feed: a strength of Twitter which seems under-attended by users in general. In any case, it's been reliable and countable: four tweets, one ad. If this is what every user with a free account is seeing, then for them, about 20 percent of the content on Twitter is now ads.

A comparison might be a free movie streaming service like Tubi, or an interactive platform like Twitch, offering users an endless routine of four minutes of the content they selected followed by one minute of advertising. But since I read the occasional tweet and skim many others, the equivalent nears a timescale of four seconds of content to one second of advertising. And since I'm still explicitly muting every advertiser, the time I spend with the ads is effectively larger than the raw 20 percent. If that's still tolerable, then the remaining distance between acceptable and unacceptable seems only a matter of stamina.

The quality and selection of the ads is tangential but noteworthy, by the way. Large-scale and reputable advertisers entirely vacating the business account for some of the "headlines," and today, two of my muted ads included a device for improving my genitalia and an invitation to learn how to completely empty my bowels each morning.

If I have a main point here, it's not to persuade anyone to adopt my own tolerance threshold for advertisements even this thickly spread. I suppose it's just to observe that the classic response to the modern accusation levelled at corporate social media – "the users are the product" – resembles "of course not: while we naturally must have a business model, we're here to benefit users, we're here to connect people, we're here to improve the world." It often rings dubious and deserves skepticism, but I don't think I've heard of a company who wouldn't attempt to profess it.

But at this point, believing such a profession from Twitter could not require more withering charity. On the inside, its appearance now so closely resembles a place proudly and purposely designed to put people so that they can view ads, that its official name may as well be changed to, say, my opening suggestion, in this case verifiably deserving of the inclusion of the proper noun.

("Come on in, users! Come right on in! Step right up and see some ads!")

I suppose I'll conclude by pointing out that none of this needs even begin to become a concern on the open, independent, or personal Web.