Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays. I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
> pushed the chronological feed
It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.
Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
all launched before Musk took over.
Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.
He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.