Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".
I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.
What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
I do agree that engagement farming is—and has been—a problem, but as someone that worked in social media (mostly on the data side, fwiw), it's been a problem for like a decade+ now, long predating "modern" Twitter. And it's a consistent problem on all platforms (I mostly use Instagram, and it's annoying on there as well).
The difference between Twitter now and Twitter a decade ago isn't in the quantity of vapid interactions; it's the proportion of that to anything else. The slide started a long, long time ago and at some point effectively no one was trying to stop it anymore. I'm sure there are still corners where useful information gets passed on in a timely manner, but like the citizens of so many venues before it those corners have been diminished and isolated to an extent that it no longer feels worthwhile for those not already entrenched in them to bother seeking them out
And my point was that, from what I can tell, that proportion of trash::value has been increasing on all social media in (more or less) lockstep. If anything, I'd say Facebook has seen the most precipitous drop in quality, not Twitter. So much so that I don't even log in anymore, and I was veritably addicted during college.
I even get sucked into contributing at times, which is why that descent into trash _works_ so well. I hate it, and I visit HN less and less as a result.
So the best ever except for one of the biggest crap parts that didn't exist at all just a few years ago?
Though actually I think it's just more people figuring out how the interests of social media companies aren't the same as their own interests, and Musk's very-visible fiddling with things drove home the "people are trying to to addict you and influence you" point MUCH more quickly than anything ever did in the past to a wide chunk of the population. Not new in essence, but now highlighted with a giant neon sign pointing at it.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.
Example, Pete's Garage.
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
The project was basically a wordle-like game, but for chess puzzles. It was focused less on being an actual chess puzzle game (i.e., tricky chess game positions that lead to a decisive turnaround) and more on actually training to improve your blunder game (i.e., each puzzle was more of a "pick a move that isn't a blunder given a scenario from a real lichess game").
He made a post on r/chess, it gathered a small number upvotes, there were a few comments left along the lines of "omg this is so awesome, this is helping my anti-blunder skills a lot, had no idea I wanted this until I saw it." And no, I didn't leave a comment, but I upvoted the post. It didn't feel right to brigade a post with my positive comments on it as a friend, especially given how anal reddit mods can get about this in some cases.
Next thing I see, mods just removed his post with a "no promotion allowed" reasoning. The website had no ads, no paid components, not even a name/profile of my friend attached to it (so no self-promotion angle either; he is gainfully employed and isn't looking for a job). He did it purely for the love of the game, some subreddit users clearly found it helpful, and yet the mods just deleted it.
I also blog, but POSSE is not as good as it could be.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
X is just a letter the current owner likes. It has absolutely no relevance to what the site does or is for.
Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?