My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).
Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?
It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.
Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.
…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.
It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.