What changes have you personally experienced?

For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.

For me nothing much has changed..

It is still a fairly slow and bloated site like always.

Need to add lots of filters to block all the politic garbage people spew, and mute anyone that repeatedly does this. Same as always.

Killing the APIs used by TweetBot and other third party products has made Twitter close to unusable.

Fritter no longer works.

At least on the aggregate.

As a previous non-regular-Twitter user, every time I checked in to see what the hype was about, it was full of people trying to create "personal brand"s and sounding very artificial. It had a very LinkedIn-ish vibe. Regular Twitter users probably had a very different experience, of course, but this average initial experience was a turn off.

There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.

It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.

I never used Twitter much, but one change I noticed is that there is more "angry political commentary" than before. Twitter has always been politically polarizing, but I feel like angry comments pop up on every thread now. For instance, when Musk announced he had picked a new CEO and referred to to her as "she", one of the replies visible at the top was how this specific Twitter user didn't want to use a product run by a woman.

Huh weird I didn’t see that at all.

I use Twitter throughout my day.

The changes I have noticed are:

I can now access the Babylon bee account.

There are basic encrypted messages now.

There is a non-algorithmic tab on the homepage.

I just went to the Babylon Bee's twitter page and looked at their latest tweet, which a Zelda joke about banning cross dressing in Florida: https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1657101451569537025

The top reply says "I'm the thickest 18 year old on Twitter" and has an NSFW profile.

The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".

The 6th reply is an image that says "It was justified" and the person's profile posts and retweets a bunch of pro-Trump and pro-gun tweets.

It really feels impossible to escape these types of political statements on the platform now.

> It really feels impossible to escape these types of political statements on the platform now.

Following Babylon Bee isn't mandatory.

As I said, it’s basically on every post, even a non-political post like announcing that a new Twitter CEO has been chosen. I used Babylon Bee as an example because you said that you didn’t see this trend and mentioned that you read the Babylon Bee.

> As I said, it’s basically on every post, even a non-political post like announcing that a new Twitter CEO has been chosen.

OK I think I understand what you're saying - every discussion turns political? Twitter has been that way since 2015. It's the world's public square. Only difference is people are allowed to disagree with Californian liberals.

It’s not the worlds public square.

It’s a gladiatorial arena (maybe WWE/performance art would be an even better metaphor) for the US culture wars. If they could please get it over with soon so we can return to normal programming, that would be great

Yep that too. I’ve said twitter is a MOBA and it’s always been that way. I once spent an awful morning having Jake Archibald and his 40K followers abuse me because I didn’t like the ’fetch’ spec.

English-language Twitter has always had a huge amount of inflammatory political commentary. I gave up on the platform for many years because I couldn't follow artists, film directors, or engineers without seeing their political opinions plastered all over my feed and I found it distracting and obnoxious. As others have pointed out, you're looking at the comment section of an account that posts political satire.

What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?

> As others have pointed out, you're looking at the comment section of an account that posts political satire.

Which account is political satire? The Babylon Bee or Elon Musk’s personal account? I kid.

> What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?

I intentionally didn’t label it. Where on the spectrum does a statement like “women can’t run companies” lie? To me, the issue isn’t political. It’s that people whose entire identity is founded upon fighting a culture war seem to be the loudest voices on Twitter. It makes the product very unpleasant.

Oh, I get that. It's just that you also wrote:

> The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".

Which is labeled and is not particularly egregious, so that weakens your point.

I don't recall comment sections of popular or political accounts ever being respectful or interesting. But in some cases, the bots that used to plague every popular account's comments do seem preferable to that kind of stuff.

huh? Twitter has always had chronological timelines. Only thing Musk added in that regard is a buggy even more magic "For You" that's harder to ignore. On my phone at least the app switched to the For You tab every restart and on many of my refreshes.

That’s not true. Twitter hid the chronological feed behind a small button barely anyone knew about. And before that there was a multi-year period where the only way to get chronological tweets was via using Lists. Which was extremely frustrating.

I’m happy Twitter has made the followers only feed a prominent two-tab UI. The algorithmic one was always completely useless. If Twitter can do what YouTube did to their feeds recommendations feeds Twitter can do very well but without TikTok style engagement metrics with videos are well suited for I have a feeling it’s always going to be bad on Twitter.

I get the feeling the only people who (ever) liked and engaged with the Twitter AI feeds are the same people who like Reddits r/all, which aren’t the sort of people I want to interact with anyway.

That's a fair point, I'd forgotten it was hard to discover. That's because it worked well for me. I looked it up and one point and then I had it configured how I want.

The new system is much more annoying for me, but it might be nicer for someone who wouldn't be able to learn about the old button.

>(1) seeing less content from people I actually follow

This is the Following tab. It's only the people you follow. The "For you" tab is stuff from the edge of your filter bubble.

The community notes is the best feature added to anything ever

My personal experience is that I like the addition of the “following” and “for you” tabs, since they make a lot more sense than the sparkle menu that used to be in their place. Unfortunately, I can’t use the “for you” tab anymore, since it no longer contains any content for me.

> Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them.

I follow a number of accounts on Twitter. If someone tweets, previously it seemed the replies which would float to the top would be the ones which were liked the most - like on HN - or perhaps from users that had the equivalent of good karma. Since the sale of blue checkmarks, now the replies which float to the top are from those shilling out eight dollars a month for the blue checkmark, and those top replies are usually inane.

Previously, well-known people would get a verified checkmark. One example talked about on the net is the singer Dionne Warwick, who lost her checkmark as she does not want to pay the eight dollars a month for it. There are two Twitter accounts calling themselves Clint Eastwood's official account - one has a blue checkmark and less than 3500 followers, one does not and has over 100,000 followers - I have no idea which is the real one, if either is. This also makes the platform less useful to use.

That seems like Clint Eastwood’s agent’s fault.

Yes, but for the people blaming Elon Musk for Clint Eastwood's agent not spending eight bucks.

Let's say both the real and the fake Clint Eastwood had blue checkmarks. Now what? Which is the real one?

There’s a separate criteria for notability.

I agree that disruption at Twitter wasn't totally unwelcome. But my reaction has been in the opposite direction; I've taken the opportunity to step back from the bologna that is ~~social media~~. I don't have any ill will towards Twitter, really; it's just kind of overstayed its welcome for me.

The decision to kill third party clients has cut my usage dramatically.

Beyond that, the decision to show every single reply from a Twitter Blue subscriber above any reply from a non-subscriber is one of the worst changes I've seen in a social media product. Elon chose to brand subscribing to Twitter Blue as a political act, so now below every tweet there's nothing but people who have agreeing with Elon's politics as a significant part of their identity.

It's not like Twitter replies were all that good before, and yet somehow he's made them significantly worse.

The tricky thing about cutting third party clients is that those users were never counted as a 'mDAU' in their reports anyway. They could have brought other benefits (like 'power users' generating content to attract monetisable users).

second this, quietly happy. i know many that are as well. we just can't really voice it because people blow their lids if you are not part of the "Current Thing", which right now is hating everything that Elon touches.