Twitter is not doing well right now. Since dissolving into anarchy within days of Elon Musk buying the company and implementing his big-brained new ideas for running the site, the future of the social network has started to seem pretty grim. Though it’s hard to tell how this mess will resolve itself in the end, certain news makes it clear that Twitter will never really go back to how it once was.
For instance: Long-standing institution SimpsonsQOTD has now closed shop after nearly a decade of tweeting jokes from the show.
Insider’s Andrew Lloyd recently spoke to Charlie Southern, the guy responsible for the account, in order to learn why he decided to pull the plug on nine years of daily Simpsons posting last week. Basically, as with just about everything that’s gone wrong with Twitter lately, it’s Elon Musk’s fault.
“Twitter is obviously changing,” Southern explained, “and it’s obvious over the last couple of weeks that the changes are coming through.”
Southern told Insider that his decision to abandon the account was made partially in order to spend more time on “personal commitments” but was sped up by “concerns about the recent takeover on Twitter and how it may affect the platform, such as the potential that fan or parody accounts could be shut down.”
He said that he never expected the project to get as big as it did anyway, only having started it while working a reception job “where he was mostly left unsupervised” back in 2013. @SimpsonsQOTD blew up very quickly, eventually reaching its current 634,000 followers thanks to Southern tweeting Simpsons jokes roughly three times a day and timing certain clips and screenshots to coincide with current events. (It’s not hard to spot what might have been on his mind while tweeting in recent weeks.)
Though he won’t post anymore, Southern “has no plans to remove the existing tweets.” He’s also happy with the more than 13,000 Simpsons quotes archived on the account, saying that he wants “people to get on there and see something that’s nostalgic or funny or something that just makes them feel a little bit better.”
With the end of SimpsonsQOTD, Twitter has lost another reason to bother checking in on the site and provided another sign that its best posters may not be sticking around for long. For now, at least, we still have Dril, even as he prepares for the likely event that “this site croaks and i gotta post somewhere else.”
Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com