Elon Musk announced today that Twitter will change it’s name and brand to “X” and everyone has an opinion. Honestly, everyone has had an opinion since Elon was rumored to buy Twitter.

Look, Elon is a smart guy and far more successful than I could ever hope to be. I have no idea if this is a good idea. But I don’t think a brand change addresses the problem.

Everyone and their mother has tried to replace Twitter. Gab, Parler, Gettr, Truth Social, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads… remember Google Wave? It never works. The newer ones don’t work because they just become political echo chambers.

First of all, we don’t need more echo chambers and censorship. Secondly, we don’t need another place for people to rant about politics.

And that has never been what I was looking for out of a new platform. I currently have around 500 followers on Twitter/X, yet I have zero engagement on posts. I can see that a handful of people have seen the posts, but no engagement. Some of that may be my marketing strategy, but at least some of it has to fall on a failure of the platform.

Maybe X will address this, but I don’t think Twitter needs new branding. It needs restructuring as a platform. Elon’s people have introduced new features, but do they work for everyone or just people who already have a lot of engagement? If I pay for Twitter Blue, will it pay off for me?

In the meantime, I am willing to try other avenues. I like Vero quite a bit, but it has a few problems. One is that they are still trying to build a user base. The other is that it really is mostly just an Instagram replacement. And then, mostly just for photographers. I recommended my friend Travis post his comic book work on Vero, but he got virtually no response. Vero isn’t a place for other kinds of creators, despite it’s options. For instance, I originally planned to make this post on Vero directly, but there is no option for a text post. Thus I will be posting this to Vero as a link. Maybe the lack of text posts is good, as it reduces the likelihood of Vero becoming another political dead end, but I find a complete lack of engagement on my links there as well.

We’ll see if this post gets any play.

In the meantime, if Elon Musk, Ayman Hariri or some other genius reads this, come up with some solution, would you? I don’t want to be an influencer, I just want my work to feel like more than just shouting into the void.