I follow a small group of people and friends, none of whom are too popular. But instead of opening the app and seeing them, I get forced to some "For You" page full of spam, scams, and Elon tweets.
A bunch of commenters claim they don't see any of this and I wonder if they are on whatever the paid plan is called, in some favorable A/B category, or just flat-out lying. Everywhere I look is fulling of gambling ads, crypto scams, drop-shipping scams, community notes about those scams with their own scams in them, and of course, adolescent Elon tweets[1].
Whenever I tweet something high quality (interesting finding or howto), I almost never see any activity metrics for it. At best gets a view or two. Sometimes I'll ask a friend for feedback on a tweet I just made, but they are unable to find it.
So this has led me to check X maybe once a week or less. I used to read through my follow timeline once a week, but with the ads and the spam/scam replies in threads I've kind of drifted down to glancing at my follow list on occasion.
It's great. Between what's happened with Twitter and Reddit, I've freed up so much more time and brain space that I wasn't aware I was expending. And you don't get FOMO for low quality content, spam, and scams.
1. This isn't a politically-motivated jab, I'm politically-moderate. It's more "Elon is the same age as me, but he acts more like my adolescent kids than a man."
Edit: I like that I posted this comment and in the half second it took to post, it's been downvoted. I think HN might have a bot problem?