Twitter Gets Doge Makeover As Another Timeline Bug Strikes

For reasons that are unclear but may have to do with a certain lawsuit, Elon Musk's self-described Twitter 2.0 has seemingly replaced major interface elements with an image of the Shiba Inu best known as the Dogecoin avatar, making good on a pre-acquisition joke. The image has replaced the main Twitter icon located at the top of the desktop version of the social media platform's website, and it also appears as a loading screen image upon refreshing one's feed. 

The meme crypto coin briefly skyrocketed to a level of actual real-world value the last time Musk trumped up the digital token, which was created — and has largely remained — as a fun joke, not something meant to have actual momentary value. Musk tweeted a meme related to the coin around the same time users began noticing the interface makeover. 

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This isn't the first time the Dogecoin and Twitter universes have collided — though it is the first time Musk has deliberately brought them together. Back in October 2022 only hours after Musk finalized his acquisition of the social media platform, Dogecoin enjoyed a relatively large but exceedingly brief spike in value as crypto holders held out hope it would become some sort of official Twitter currency. That didn't happen, and if history is any indication, this latest stunt likely isn't evidence of any such grand changes in how Twitter works. The company's billionaire owner has a long history of embracing memes and rolling out subjectively amusing jokes, and it's a safe bet to assume this latest escapade is more of the same.

Amid the hoopla surrounding the sudden arrival of the Dogecoin dog on Twitter is an annoying change involving the platform's retweet feature. Generally speaking, a retweeted tweet will be joined by a small string of text that makes it clear someone else has shared the post on their own timeline. However, that retweet dialogue isn't currently showing up, which is leaving impacted users with the impression that tweets from people they don't follow are suddenly appearing in their timelines. 

As with many things involving Twitter these past few months, it's unclear whether this is a bug, a deliberate change, or a test that is only impacting a small percentage of people. In fact, it would be fair to assume that whatever is going on behind the scenes that resulted in the Dogecoin dog appearing could potentially be the reason for the retweet dialogue box's absence — perhaps playing around with one thing led to accidentally breaking another thing. That wouldn't be surprising considering that Twitter is currently run by a barebones team of overworked employees.