Twitter is great as long as you aren't following political accounts. I only follow the content creators I enjoy related to my hobbies, and unfollow anyone who tends to get into political slapfights too often.

That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience.

My opinion on them has largely been "at least they're trying something different", barring some decisions which seemed boneheaded for a platform that relies so heavily on linked traffic (eg when they outright turned off/broke tweet embedding and hiding all replies behind a login).

Some changes, like paid verification, have been a net positive in my opinion. No more of twitter picking favorites, particularly since the checkmark didn't mean much anyway.

This was especially meaningful for non-English speaking Twitter, as even Japanese Twitter, despite being their second biggest audience, often came off as being treated as a second class community when it came to things like verification.