Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, on Wednesday invited users to send him their complaints about the platform.
“Complaint hotline operator online!” the billionaire entrepreneur said in a tweet to his 115 million followers. “Please mention your complaints below.”
Complaint hotline operator online! Please mention your complaints below.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022
Within hours, some 83,000 tweets flooded in with a broad mix of sensible suggestions, gripes, memes, and borderline lunacy regarding various Twitter-related matters, though a number of irrelevant subjects also managed to squeeze their way in.
Common issues raised in the replies include Twitter verification, which is getting more confusing by the day, suspended accounts, and requests for various features.
Several replies asked for a dislike button, others for a redesign of Twitter’s website, while at least one person called for the return of Fleets, Twitter’s short-lived effort at competing with Snapchat and Instagram Stories that was ditched in 2021. Oddball tweets include one asking how to open a jar of mayo with a stuck lid (holding it under a flow of hot water for a few seconds does the trick, apparently), and another asking how to save a receding hairline.
At the time of writing, Musk, who recently bought Twitter for $44 billion, has responded to only one of the replies — no mean feat considering how his time is now taken up by not one, not even two, but five large enterprises (Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink).
Rather than personally respond to every single reply, a later tweet from Musk kind of answered every response in one fell swoop: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months,” he said. “We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”
