But that’s not why I think it’s time to withdraw the “tweet.” I wanted to save it. I felt that he was clearly becoming independent of the brand that had adopted him. I argued that we should call all microblog posts tweets to avoid this ridiculous cycle of toots, skeets, threets, and now xeets. But with each vestige of the name slowly being removed from the social media landscape, “tweeting” feels more and more like a bygone era.
It was meant to be short. Something remarkable in the art of its conciseness. In a tweet, Roger Ebert once compared the 140-character blog to poetry due to its necessary brevity. Now, if you pay enough, you can have up to 4,000 characters in a Tweet, or you can get 500 free characters in Threads, almost five times Twitter’s original character limit. You no longer have to be so economical with your words.
But the real reason we need to stop calling microblog posts tweets is not because the microblog itself is slowly getting rid of its micro or because X is changing the Tweet button. We have to stop using it because I’ve really been trying for the past few weeks ever since I asked that we all call them tweets and it sucked. “Hey, did you see that tweet from Thread?” sounds dumber than “Hey, did you see that Thread post” when it’s a 500 character rant about someone? Diablo IV build. Same for “Can you believe what that lady tweeted on Mastodon?”
So folks, we’re going to have to stick to “post.” It’s not as funny, it doesn’t do anything to someone’s trademark, and it won’t explain a situation as clearly as “the president just tweeted.” But at least it’s easy to say.
