One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.

I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads.

It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO

Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted.

Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)

> Any number of people would prefer blue check

... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.

What’s X?

A variable you could substitute with anything.

I'd like to substitute it for x

which holds a value "X"

It's what Musk is trying to rebrand Twitter as.

it's that thing you used to call twitter.

x.com

This is what GP was referring to when they said "chaos monkeys"

If I go to x.com it redirects me to a site called twitter.com in which there are things called "tweets" and "retweets"

The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input. The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like systems, it is now available on many other architectures, such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding feature especially useful there.

So does twitter redirect to x.org now?

Would be an improvement to be honest :)

It's a slang term for MDMA. Clearly the poster means that you don't have to interact with anyone when you're on ecstasy.

The chaos monkeys aren’t Twitter users, they’re changes to the site that Musk dictates.

A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.

It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.