For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.
It is still a fairly slow and bloated site like always.
Need to add lots of filters to block all the politic garbage people spew, and mute anyone that repeatedly does this. Same as always.
At least on the aggregate.
There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.
It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.
I use Twitter throughout my day.
The changes I have noticed are:
I can now access the Babylon bee account.
There are basic encrypted messages now.
There is a non-algorithmic tab on the homepage.
The top reply says "I'm the thickest 18 year old on Twitter" and has an NSFW profile.
The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".
The 6th reply is an image that says "It was justified" and the person's profile posts and retweets a bunch of pro-Trump and pro-gun tweets.
It really feels impossible to escape these types of political statements on the platform now.
Following Babylon Bee isn't mandatory. If you do, nor is reading the replies. FWIW I see memes not the thickest 18 year old on Twitter.
OK I think I understand what you're saying - every discussion turns political? Twitter has been that way since 2015. It's the world's public square. Only difference is people are allowed to disagree with Californian liberals.
It’s a gladiatorial arena (maybe WWE/performance art would be an even better metaphor) for the US culture wars. If they could please get it over with soon so we can return to normal programming, that would be great
What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
Which account is political satire? The Babylon Bee or Elon Musk’s personal account? I kid.
> What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
I intentionally didn’t label it. Where on the spectrum does a statement like “women can’t run companies” lie? To me, the issue isn’t political. It’s that people whose entire identity is founded upon fighting a culture war seem to be the loudest voices on Twitter. It makes the product very unpleasant.
> The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".
Which is labeled and is not particularly egregious, so that weakens your point.
I don't recall comment sections of popular or political accounts ever being respectful or interesting. But in some cases, the bots that used to plague every popular account's comments do seem preferable to that kind of stuff.
I’m happy Twitter has made the followers only feed a prominent two-tab UI. The algorithmic one was always completely useless. If Twitter can do what YouTube did to their feeds recommendations feeds Twitter can do very well but without TikTok style engagement metrics with videos are well suited for I have a feeling it’s always going to be bad on Twitter.
I get the feeling the only people who (ever) liked and engaged with the Twitter AI feeds are the same people who like Reddits r/all, which aren’t the sort of people I want to interact with anyway.
The new system is much more annoying for me, but it might be nicer for someone who wouldn't be able to learn about the old button.
This is the Following tab. It's only the people you follow. The "For you" tab is stuff from the edge of your filter bubble.
I follow a number of accounts on Twitter. If someone tweets, previously it seemed the replies which would float to the top would be the ones which were liked the most - like on HN - or perhaps from users that had the equivalent of good karma. Since the sale of blue checkmarks, now the replies which float to the top are from those shilling out eight dollars a month for the blue checkmark, and those top replies are usually inane.
Previously, well-known people would get a verified checkmark. One example talked about on the net is the singer Dionne Warwick, who lost her checkmark as she does not want to pay the eight dollars a month for it. There are two Twitter accounts calling themselves Clint Eastwood's official account - one has a blue checkmark and less than 3500 followers, one does not and has over 100,000 followers - I have no idea which is the real one, if either is. This also makes the platform less useful to use.
Beyond that, the decision to show every single reply from a Twitter Blue subscriber above any reply from a non-subscriber is one of the worst changes I've seen in a social media product. Elon chose to brand subscribing to Twitter Blue as a political act, so now below every tweet there's nothing but people who have agreeing with Elon's politics as a significant part of their identity.
It's not like Twitter replies were all that good before, and yet somehow he's made them significantly worse.