Performance and general stability has absolutely fallen for me though, and the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter was a technical embarrassment/disaster as far as I could tell.
It's remarkable, and sad.
My own take, is I'd like to see the establishment sellouts pushed out at far greater and faster rates, even though I don't necessarily agree with many positions, I don't like the corporatist sellouts and most politicians reach that point within a single term of federal office. There are grassroots efforts in both D & R camps to do just that.
That doesn't even get into the deep establishment in terms of Military Industrial Complex or Pharma/Food revolving doors in place. It's kind of gross. It's honestly at a point, that even if I'm in favor of more Libertarian solutions, while others want Socialism, most can agree, the establishment needs to go first, then can debate on longer term reforms.
However, it also seems to interpret "hate viewing" as "high interest" in terms of engagement. Sometimes I'll look at an account just one time, often by searching for it, in order to see some Tweet that's in the news or generating controversy. And then a few days later I'll start seeing Tweets from similar accounts in the "for you" tab, which I definitely don't want to see.
On other websites with recommendation algorithms, like YouTube, I can avoid this effect by viewing ragebait content in an incognito window, effectively curating my algorithm by opting out of it for content I don't want affecting future recommendations. But I can't do that with Twitter, because the login wall requires authentication to view more than the top three replies to a tweet. I wish there were some way to give the algorithm more intentional feedback on its recommendations.
Cryptocurrency spam has declined simply because the cryptocurrency markets have tanked.
Overall spam is way, way worse than before, and it's shockingly low-effort. My DMs are absolutely useless - just chock full of obvious bot accounts who want to "date" me and just need me to click a link first.
I used to get one of those every few months, rare enough that it would surprise me. Since December or so, I've been getting multiple every day.
EDIT: In the one minute it's been since I wrote this comment, I just received yet another.
On the other hand, this looks to me like trying all sorts of things to see what will work.
They removed the annoying login pop-up.
I only interact with twitter using links from other platforms. I don't use the trending hashtags or search.
So for me, it's been better since Elon took over.
Wasn't that already a problem before he took over? I seem to recall Joe Biden hawking some crypto scam after Twitter's admin got catfished into giving a third party access to his account.
Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.
Why did the same commitment to speech over profit not apply to his decision making when he filtered Substack, or Mastadon URLs?
> Free speech absolutists believe that any limitation on political speech is veering into dangerous territory. They believe that restricting free speech in any way, including curbing insulting or factually incorrect speech, means assigning gatekeepers who decide what can and cannot be expressed in public.
Twitter's censorship policy does seem to have moved in that direction in general.
But I grant you that the terms are a bit overloaded and it's not always clear what people mean by them.
PS: Edited "free speech" to "principles" since it was causing much debate about semantics.
This type of exaggeration perfectly illustrates the mainstream media's tendency to perpetuate misinformation about Twitter. It contributes to the false narrative that Elon's stewardship is 'destroying' Twitter, which is far from reality.
For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.
>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.
Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
Edit: I perhaps used "free speech" a bit ambiguously in the previous comment. I edited it to "principles" to avoid causing more debate about semantics.
Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop with this pretending?