It’s week three of the start of what will undoubtedly be a wildly (yet sadly distant) summer. There’s still sunshine, kids are schooled into conformity and even Amazon is still the thought leader for e-commerce. Even so, here in Washington we’re still trying to grapple with a few lingering questions about the weather — and, more specifically, “where’s the rain?”
That question appeared in All Things Considered’s weekly show Ask Your Weatherman, where contributor Jason Best recapped his most recent forecast by asking viewers to send him any weather-related questions he might need help answering. More than 500 people participated in the poll, and one of them is seemingly driving the news cycle once again today with its stunning reply.
Best tweeted out a link to a query (tweeted by XFD-rrespondent) asking, “what is the next step to ‘yassify’ (i.e. coordinate your online life in a healthy way)?” The Twitter user was complaining about the fact that the “weather!” signout at the bottom of her Facebook feed was not activated — a fact many users pointed out.
While “diversity” might not seem the first thing to come to mind when you think of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, nor a frustrated user’s complaint about the temperature in her Facebook news feed, both aspects of the latter’s been hashtagged and commented on widely.
In short, users are using #yassifygate to make fun of what they say is the weirdness of social media and what they describe as a possible attempt by social media sites to more socially mediate our online interactions.
Exactly why some Twitter users are seeing similarities to …
It’s hardly the first time users have come up with the same idea, without a hint of spelling and grammar troubles, and began posting “@Tesla” image macros to the social media platform. But perhaps a curiosity in Tesla’s name points to Musk’s lack of comfort with the name until months ago.
When the micro-blogging service was launched in 2006, some users decided to try and capitalize on the name, opening Twitter accounts like @TeslaMotors or @TeslaMotorsMotors. Without any clue to the fact that both of those handles were already taken, one user tweeted a picture of a Model S, showing one fender end damaged after the car crashed in a club parking lot. The post gained 15,000 retweets, and roughly 18,000 more were generated from posts relating to that one image.
But while Elon Musk may have had some misgivings about his own name coming up in the hundreds of thousands of tweets that share #yassifyaca in the name of the company he founded, it doesn’t mean he won’t try to “yassify” the world any time it presents itself.