An open letter to Elon Musk: Leave stan Twitter alone

Elon, babe, you're down bad. You've let go of 73 percent of Twitter's staff, let the site deteriorate on your watch, and you’re so desperate to make back $44 billion that you've turned one of Twitter's most valuable assets — verification — into a sloppy free-for-all (well… an $8-for-all).

When evening falls and you curl up under the covers, brushing away the crumbling blunt you smoked to fall asleep the night before, does doubt creep into your mind? Do you ask yourself… what if I made a mistake? (You did.) Is the whole world laughing at me? (Yes). Can I salvage this? (Maybe!)

Coming back from this seems pretty straightforward (just undo every change you've made), but I have one piece of advice you may not have heard yet: Don't mess with the stans.

Consistently engaged, always creative, and funny as hell, stan Twitter is one of the largest factions of users you haven't seemed to piss off yet. Barbz, Arianators, Swifties, and the Beyhive are mighty enemies in almost any arena but on Twitter, they are some of your most valuable power users. And don't forget the K-pop stans, who wield decisive power. BTS's massive Army fandom have helped the group claim 17 of the top 30 most-liked tweets in history. Your tweets, Elon, account for… two. 

Here are four reasons you should leave them alone:

1. They don't want anything from you

The good folks over on stan Twitter just want a place to yell into the void and post fancams of Timothée Chalamet crying to a Phoebe Bridgers song. They are extremely self-sufficient and don't want anything from your platform except for it to function. In fact, they barely care about you at all and, if you're smart, you'll figure out how to keep it that way.

2. They are crucial to the culture of the platform

Stan Twitter is an engagement machine, trending new hashtags, starting new beefs, and creating new content formats by the hour. Tweeting is a hobby, and they do it dozens of times a day. Their vocabulary — words like "fancam," "lil meow meow," and "naur" — has permeated online and offline spaces. They keep Twitter a relevant, relatable, and reliable cultural hub.

3. They make Twitter valuable

Engagement from stan Twitter makes the platform valuable to brands, publications, celebrities and marketing teams. As some of Twitter's most vocal and devoted users, stans drive the economy of platform, making it a destination for advertisers. They lend Twitter its cache as a bustling, sometimes hectic, place to find and interact with consumers.

4. They're never going to pay for Twitter

...So don't try to make them. I am sure you're tossing around the idea of making users pay to post videos or to tweet more than a dozen times a day and to that I say: Stop. Don't. Chill. Because in the toss up between paying for a new album from their fave and paying for Twitter, stans are going to pick the album. Every. Single. Time. You think it's hard to get regular folks to pay for Twitter? Try getting money from someone in a parasocial relationship with an emotional support K-pop boy. It's not gonna happen.