At this point it has gotten bad enough that I won't even view twitter links. It is ethically corrupt to give them views/money, and dangerous. Threads is a reasonable replacement if you need the fix.
I think it's just become a bad experience. Twitter / X has really just become no fun. I have enough stress in my life without adding the stuff Twitter's algorithm thinks I'm interested in.
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
I don't think it's an accident that this is happening at the same time that there is a "news site throttling" going on. I bet it's just yet another failing system at Twitter HQ.
I feel like all this "twitter is a hellscape now" is posing trying to get back at Musk because his idea about who should be allowed on twitter doesn't match theirs. And mainly for politically tribal and partisan reasons, to be blunt.
Also I note I have never followed or sent a link to Threads so far - not because I am somehow opposed to that, just there was no opportunity to do that since nothing that could interest me and is published there got into my attention so far. There's little reason to prefer one to the other, but effectively my experience shows twitter links sometimes contain useful information - I follow several every week - and I haven't seen any Threads links yet that did. Maybe in time that'll happen too.
I'm sure this is true of some people, but the habitual Twitter users I know have basically given up on the site as a shared social space because of changes to the feed algorithm and the blue check system making the sort of social engagement they used to regularly enjoy on the site almost impossible.
As for the feed algos, there may be some truth to that, I personally have no idea since I never looked at the "feed" - I only ever engaged twitter by using direct links or reading the twitstream of specific people I was interested in. But I could imagine algorithm changes could ruin somebody's carefully constructed bubble and that could be upsetting. The reasons given in the article though have a strong political bent.
Well...yeah. That's social media for you. At the end of the day, you have to give people a reason to visit, it can't all be ragebait and crypto-scammers.
By all appearances, its utility as a social space has tanked, and that's not a hard sentiment to find even in this comments section. Twitter remains king of being a de-facto centralized RSS feed, but that position is very precarious.
I have to imagine that traffic plummeted after the latter.