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Wow if I didn’t use the app every day I’d stay totally clear of it after reading these quotes right from the beginning of the article. This really doesn’t repre

Wow if I didn’t use the app every day I’d stay totally clear of it after reading these quotes right from the beginning of the article. This really doesn’t represent my experience at all. Am I alone or has the experience actually improved? I don’t follow people who are toxic because I don’t enjoy their content. It’s mostly software engineers and the #buildinpublic community and it’s a beautiful place with them. What has changed that has made the platform worse? It feels subjectively better in my experience. > designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk > interested in a less angry place for conversations.” > interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”

coldpie 3y ago
Removing verification was a major decline in usability. Verified accounts were good to know that you'd found the correct account for an organization or person you were looking for, but that's gone now. Verification was also a good first approximation that the account is at least somewhat notable, and not just some random online person, but that's gone now, too. With verification, Twitter used to be a moderately trustworthy source of news, now it's just a big pile of low-trust accounts saying things. You can certainly do the work to build your own trust network, but that's exactly what I mean by "decline in usability."
- moojd 3y ago
  I agree that 'real' verification was useful, but on the other hand removing it had the nice side-effect of 'breaking the spell' of twitter's imagined importance. People take it way less seriously now which I think is positive.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    To provide a concrete example, Twitter was nice for getting bus service updates from whatever transit agency operates in the city I happen to be in. I used to be able to look at a bus sign and see the service agency here is called "Metro Transit", so I could search "Metro Transit" on Twitter and somewhere early in the search results a verified account would pop up with something like "Twin Cities Metro Transit" in the description. I can be almost certain that's the account I want to look at. Now that verification is gone, I have to try way harder to find the right account in the sea of conversations, spam, inactive accounts, etc etc. Or go outside Twitter to find the agency's website and dig around for their social contacts, blah blah. Nothing to do with "importance" here, I just want to know what's going on with the bus service. Twitter used to be good for that, now it's a chore.
bachmeier 3y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvotes, but it's absolutely getting worse for me. They shut down Tweetdeck to anyone that doesn't pay about $100 a year (until the inevitable increase). The Twitter web client is far worse, infected with an overwhelming number of ads and run by an algorithm that thinks I'm looking for racist content. I had no intention of leaving after Elon took over, but he managed to find a way.
martindbp 3y ago
If you like drama that's what you'll get. I actively unfollow people I like if their tweets are too much about politics etc. Wish there was a better way of filtering individual tweets rather than people, but basically Twitter/X is completely what you make of it.
blululu 3y ago
Not sure about the downvotes. I kind of agree that the platform has cleaned up in the past few months. It feels more generic, clean and flat than before but also less trolly. Better and worse depend on your tastes, but I don’t think too much has been lost in the past 6 months.
dotnet00 3y ago
Twitter is great as long as you aren't following political accounts. I only follow the content creators I enjoy related to my hobbies, and unfollow anyone who tends to get into political slapfights too often. That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience. My opinion on them has largely been "at least they're trying something different", barring some decisions which seemed boneheaded for a platform that relies so heavily on linked traffic (eg when they outright turned off/broke tweet embedding and hiding all replies behind a login). Some changes, like paid verification, have been a net positive in my opinion. No more of twitter picking favorites, particularly since the checkmark didn't mean much anyway. This was especially meaningful for non-English speaking Twitter, as even Japanese Twitter, despite being their second biggest audience, often came off as being treated as a second class community when it came to things like verification.
- Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
  > That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience. There's a big big narrative being pushed by people who, for one reason or another, really can't stand Elon. A lot of them are absurdly far left.
input_sh 3y ago
You've said it "improved" and "gotten better" without naming a single concrete thing that's better than before? Here, I'll name three that have gotten noticeably worse: 1. Under any viral tweet I have to scroll through the sea of Twitter Blue subscribers with >1000 followers to reach some sane reply (as in not a one word reply, @reply_to_this_ai_bot, @save_to_this_random_tool, a crylaugh emoji). 2. Monetization depends on impressions, incentivizing ragebait that other people will "dunk on". Correcting someone gives money to the person you're correcting, which is insane to say the least. 3. API is dead, but bots are literally everywhere. And they're the stupidest kind of bots on top of that. "Contact @soandso on Insta and he'll get your account back", there's a shitcoin trending literally every day, and so on.

coldpie 3y ago

Removing verification was a major decline in usability. Verified accounts were good to know that you'd found the correct account for an organization or person you were looking for, but that's gone now. Verification was also a good first approximation that the account is at least somewhat notable, and not just some random online person, but that's gone now, too. With verification, Twitter used to be a moderately trustworthy source of news, now it's just a big pile of low-trust accounts saying things. You can certainly do the work to build your own trust network, but that's exactly what I mean by "decline in usability."

moojd 3y ago
I agree that 'real' verification was useful, but on the other hand removing it had the nice side-effect of 'breaking the spell' of twitter's imagined importance. People take it way less seriously now which I think is positive.
- coldpie 3y ago
  To provide a concrete example, Twitter was nice for getting bus service updates from whatever transit agency operates in the city I happen to be in. I used to be able to look at a bus sign and see the service agency here is called "Metro Transit", so I could search "Metro Transit" on Twitter and somewhere early in the search results a verified account would pop up with something like "Twin Cities Metro Transit" in the description. I can be almost certain that's the account I want to look at. Now that verification is gone, I have to try way harder to find the right account in the sea of conversations, spam, inactive accounts, etc etc. Or go outside Twitter to find the agency's website and dig around for their social contacts, blah blah. Nothing to do with "importance" here, I just want to know what's going on with the bus service. Twitter used to be good for that, now it's a chore.

bachmeier 3y ago

Not sure why you're getting downvotes, but it's absolutely getting worse for me. They shut down Tweetdeck to anyone that doesn't pay about $100 a year (until the inevitable increase). The Twitter web client is far worse, infected with an overwhelming number of ads and run by an algorithm that thinks I'm looking for racist content. I had no intention of leaving after Elon took over, but he managed to find a way.

martindbp 3y ago

If you like drama that's what you'll get. I actively unfollow people I like if their tweets are too much about politics etc. Wish there was a better way of filtering individual tweets rather than people, but basically Twitter/X is completely what you make of it.

blululu 3y ago

Not sure about the downvotes. I kind of agree that the platform has cleaned up in the past few months. It feels more generic, clean and flat than before but also less trolly. Better and worse depend on your tastes, but I don’t think too much has been lost in the past 6 months.

dotnet00 3y ago

Twitter is great as long as you aren't following political accounts. I only follow the content creators I enjoy related to my hobbies, and unfollow anyone who tends to get into political slapfights too often. That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience. My opinion on them has largely been "at least they're trying something different", barring some decisions which seemed boneheaded for a platform that relies so heavily on linked traffic (eg when they outright turned off/broke tweet embedding and hiding all replies behind a login). Some changes, like paid verification, have been a net positive in my opinion. No more of twitter picking favorites, particularly since the checkmark didn't mean much anyway. This was especially meaningful for non-English speaking Twitter, as even Japanese Twitter, despite being their second biggest audience, often came off as being treated as a second class community when it came to things like verification.

Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
> That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience. There's a big big narrative being pushed by people who, for one reason or another, really can't stand Elon. A lot of them are absurdly far left.

input_sh 3y ago

You've said it "improved" and "gotten better" without naming a single concrete thing that's better than before? Here, I'll name three that have gotten noticeably worse: 1. Under any viral tweet I have to scroll through the sea of Twitter Blue subscribers with >1000 followers to reach some sane reply (as in not a one word reply, @reply_to_this_ai_bot, @save_to_this_random_tool, a crylaugh emoji). 2. Monetization depends on impressions, incentivizing ragebait that other people will "dunk on". Correcting someone gives money to the person you're correcting, which is insane to say the least. 3. API is dead, but bots are literally everywhere. And they're the stupidest kind of bots on top of that. "Contact @soandso on Insta and he'll get your account back", there's a shitcoin trending literally every day, and so on.