Anecdotes of course, but the last I pulled up my personal Twitter feed 1 in every 5 tweets was Promoted (and 2 of three of those were toxic engagement bait). 2 in every 5 comments were "so-and-so liked this engagement bait" from an algorithm somewhere, leaving just 6 in 15, before I got angry and bailed, "curate-able" tweets from actual people I followed.

Admittedly I switched to Mastodon months back and some weeds are to be expected as I have intentionally avoided Twitter, but it was pretty well curated when I was a heavy Twitter user, and I absolutely can blame Twitter directly for the low value of Promoted content and algorithm generated content I never directly followed and cannot directly curate.

I found that over the past year, people who didn't talk about politics or who had well thought out posts have changed into hot-takes machines or constantly ridiculing bad replies. I have purged follows several times over the past few years, but I find that the same people that I learned new things from a few months ago changed and got more toxic over time. I recently realized that I would read Twitter for a half hour and at the end couldn't think of a single useful thing I learned but my brain felt more chaotic and stressed. Every once in a while I find a new person to follow and learn a new perspective, but if you step back and ask how often that really happens, it is becoming more rare. It has just gotten too hard to filter the noise myself. Twitter inherently sends you superficial, inflammatory ideas faster than I can figure out if they are BS or not. People who I thought were reliable a few months ago change and become unreliable as they get recruited into some tribal war in their own information bubble.

Sorry if this question is off base (I haven't been on Twitter in a couple of years now), but I thought Twitter had gotten rid of the reverse chronological timeline and instead were surfacing tweets their algorithm thought you'd like. Is that not the case?