And the fact that sewage is now the content that is prioritised. Blue checkmarks went from being a flawed, but useful signal of interest, to being a symbol for the most garbage content on the internet. And I have to wade through the filth if I want to make it to anything interesting.

Elon's checkmark system is the equivalent to the hot weather that caused the Great Stink [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

Twitter of late is blue-checked bot replying to trending topic with copy-pasted text, to which bunch of another bots doing the same, creating fabricated and monetized reply trees. A lot has Arabic profile too. It's money laundering in the open, weird that no actions are being taken.

It is objectively much worse now.

Which is natural when you effectively disband the safety teams and allow all previous banned accounts back onto the platform. Also where as Twitter at least tried to comply with codes of practice, X has simply just given up.

Also a lot of it has to do with Musk being the face of the platform and endlessly trying to start culture wars.

I wonder if there are measurements to prove that it is "objectively much worse" - besides the decrease in traffic, decrease in users, and decrease in advertising that can be mainly attributed to a period of adjustment & political bias.

> It is objectively much worse now.

Unless you happen to be politically conservative, where before you would be banned for discussing views which are legal to hold, and base a political party on.

The only people complaining about it being worse now are those no longer in power to censor opinions they disagree with from the internet.

But yes, there’s lots of garbage there too. Always was. No doubt about that.

> banned for discussing views

They banned people for their position on taxes?

Why not just say "nazi stuff" or "white supremacist views" if they are so unobjectionable that they should occupy our public spaces? Afraid of defending those things?

the only conservative views I've ever seen get "censored" are those pertaining to race, gender, and sexual orientation. You know, areas where some modern conservatives like being discriminatory assholes.

I've never seen someone get censored for promoting small government or low taxes.

And in fact many people complaining about censorship before the takeover and shouting their hateful views still ended up in trending all the time. IMO there wasn’t enough moderation and there’d be times accounts very clearly in violation of the terms not get suspended.

> the only conservative views I've ever seen get "censored" are those pertaining to race, gender, and sexual orientation.

So basically biology then. You’ve seen factual statements about biology, about reality, censored and you don’t find it problematic?

Predictable retort

phrenology is not real science.

neither are the claims that intersex people don't exist, or that homosexuality is some choice that goes against what nature intends.

my dad makes a lot of these dumb arguments, and then doesn't believe me when i explain that there are disorders which cause people to have a missing sex chromosome, or body parts that don't match their chromosomes, or try to explain how gender dysphoria works and is treated, or even that gender as a social construct is separate from sex as a biological facet. he's not using science to back up these opinions, he's just an old man with dated views and hides behind the "basic biology" rhetoric.

it's funny how the real world consensus among actual scientists and doctors does not conform with conservative politics here.

That's because science is leftist propaganda run by the new world order!!

or something

You don't need gender dysphoria to be trans, that's the argument of yesteryear. People who try to advance that view these days are labelled as 'transmedicalists' and shunned almost as harshly as those who are labelled 'terfs'.

The fashionable view amongst progressives right now is that anyone can claim any gender identity for any reason, and everyone else should be required to validate this. I wonder how you'd attempt to defend this viewpoint to your dad?

Yeah, you never saw it

I would rather say that Twitter had a sewer, but you didn't have to climb into it if you didn't want to, and it mostly didn't back up into everyone's homes and onto the streets.

The new mayor of Twitter/X has decided that he likes the smell of his own shit and that everyone else should be forced to experience it, so we get piles of vapid idiotic blue check marks dominating discussion rather than the comments that are considered best by the crowd.

Despite all the shit flowing in the streets, it can still be somewhat avoided, and there is valuable information on Twitter that I can not find from any other source. High quality curators of information about computational biology, energy, housing politics, etc. do not have as large a presence on any other social network yet. I just need to avoid any viral tweets or anything from the "For You" or trending topics, and I can avoid stepping in the worst of it.