Personally, I’ve really come around to the idea. I follow a few baseball accounts - if an amazing highlight gets popular over on the LA Dodgers account, I want to see it without needing to trust the Mets might repost it or it’ll make the MLB’s accounts or whatever else. I don’t make a habit of following public entities like teams or brands or sports meme accounts, but sometimes they post things that really resonate with people who follow the accounts I do follow
A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in
On Twitter you can simply select "following" instead of "for you" and all the tweets you see come exclusively from the people you follow, in chronological order. If I was forced to sift through the endless mounds of garbage recommended by Twitter (or any a social media company) there is a 0% chance I'd use it.
>A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in
I think the big question is, what does "social" mean to you? Personally I only want to see posts and messages from friends, people and organizations I proactively choose to follow. As long as I'm able to personally curate my own experience the toxic brew of e-celebs, SEO nonsense, advertisements and government/corporate propaganda of all kinds if almost entirely absent from my timeline. It may appeal to some people but it is absolutely repulsive to me (and others).
this is clearly not a platform that caters to that use case, so if that's what you want then you shouldn't use it. if you're infuriated because the entire world isn't designed to specifically cater to your expectations, you're going to spend a lot of time being infuriated