Well, I certaintly find it useful since I’ve removed X from my phone but still want to peer inside on occasion (a few people whose posts I value refuse to move to Mastodon and I don’t want to use Threads or Bluesy), so this is pretty useful. The ads have become so obnoxious that being able to just have “Following” open without hassles feels refreshing.
If the ads on Twitter were even close to relevant I wouldn't mind just scrolling past them. But every ad I see lately is just right-wing idiocy like PragerU.
>I don’t understand why people even use twitter at all at this point.
Because it hasn't really changed for me. Some things are better (less censorship), some things are worse (bots and spam). But the overall signal is the same.
All my friends are on there and haven't switched to another site. Some nice features are definitely getting removed from it though (like being able to hide a tweet so only a subset of your followers can see it).
That’s probably not it. I still have Twitter because the people I follow are on there (mostly music artists). I’ve never opened the algorithmic feed. There is also a huge chance that much of the activity you see are bots. I have 0 posts and 2000 followers somehow. No way they’re human
It's not it for you, but it sounds like you are more of an edge case. I think it is true for a lot of people.
I don't see any activity myself, I don't use Twitter any more. I had an addiction which peaked with the UK 2019 election and I had to quit after that. It's an awful drug which gives no high and terrible side effects.
Please be aware that the both of you don’t know, unless you’re not mentioning any studies on purpose. You’re both projecting your own subjective experience onto an entire community.
I really think the question is why wouldn't you block those ads using something like ublock origin or adguard (admittly you will lose using the app which is better for some people) but you solve your greatest point of pain.
I think the original question is valid here - I also don’t get any right-wing ads. I guess that is because I never interact with those kind of post, also not negatively, exactly BECAUSE I want to see less of them.
Twitter still allows you to mute/block any advertiser… I’ve seen fewer big companies that make a million throwaway accounts for advertising to make it hard to mute. Any ad account I notice more than a couple times gets muted, Twitter asks me if I want to upgrade to paid and I ignore that.
As Twitter and Reddit were going user-hostile past the point of no return last year I fought it for a while with actions like these. But eventually giving up and ditching them completely was unavoidable and, in hindsight, freeing.
For some reason, the fight of most social media against any third party way to access them comfortably helped people like me finding the motivation to get rid of them altogether.
Yep. Instagram has been so hostile up logged-out people that it drove me away, and I actively recommend businesses avoid. Prior to this, quite a few small businesses I ran across used Instagram as their website, but it's completely useless if people can't see anything.
Pretty much. I ditched my Facebook account in 2017 and never really messed with IG. At some point I just wasn't seeing much of what I liked about the site initially (a feed of what friends and acquaintances were up to) and didn't find it worth the tradeoff - lots of companies are skeevy, but I might continue using their products if I get something out of them. Didn't find FB to be worth it.
But still, I'm in a few long running group chats with friends and maybe 60-70% of the links people post are to Meta sites. Can't access even though it's almost always just something reposted from a (openly accessible) website.
The bots and the spam ruining platforms is bad enough. Putting such a large chunk of actual online human conversation behind login-walls has seriously put a dent in things. I feel like this is the other half of the whole "search engines suck now because of ML-generated/SEO-optimized junk" argument. There's nothing to balance that stuff out because you need a sketchy persistent, personally-identifiable account to access the rest.
