Look, far be it from us to suggest that Elon Musk thinks that the gaggle of schmucks who pay for his stupid website are perhaps collectively not the sharpest tools in the global shed. But sometimes it does seem that way—like today, for instance, when people on X found themselves prompted to promote their posts on X.com by a hand directing them to the “Promote” button.

Now at this point, you’re probably envisaging a little jiggling 👆 emoji, or perhaps the icon into which the macOS mouse cursor transforms when you hover over a clickable link. No. No, what we’re talking about is an entire goddamn arm appearing unprompted on screen:

This is the sort of egregious violation of user experience that people absolutely hate—and rightly so. Years ago, the sales staff at the website of which I was Editor-in-Chief struck a deal to wrap the entire site in a virtual bubble wrap situation as a promotion for some sort of product (I honestly can’t remember what it was). Anyway, no one thought to tell the editorial staff of this, the users went batshit, a meeting was convened hastily, and the bubble wrap was banished to outer darkness.

But shit, at least we got paid for the whole sorry affair (I mean, I’m assuming we did). Quite why X has decided of its own volition to inflict a similarly obnoxious experience on its users is unclear. It might just be a flight of whimsy on the part of a developer, although it’s hard to imagine that such a visible and unexpected UX change would be implemented without the approval of the site’s CEO, given that he’s a four-dimensional chess enthusiast and brain genius whose baleful eye sees all and whose reasoning cannot be comprehended by lesser mortals.

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