It is hard to argue that Twitter is still where many of these conversations are happening. People already have their followers there and unless you have a big name that can easily get people to move over to something, it is going to be pretty hard to move.
Personally I have tried to rebuild on other platforms but the engagement keeps happening on twitter even when I make the same posts on the new alternatives.
In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing.
Personally I've noticed practically no change.
But my personal follow feed has all the interesting topics that I follow so it's easy to just stick to that.
I remember in the early days of Reddit it was pretty common to interact with all sorts of relatively well known people in their field. Now it's just soccer moms and bot farms.
While there are still a few experts lurking around HN, I've noticed this has declined as well over time. In part I suspect because the HN crowd has increasingly become surprisingly less technically expert on average.
TikTok has become my "random browsing" feed. But I will go to Twitter and YouTube to get full-length unedited content when I need specific content.
IME, there's two things that were a bad problem pre-takeover and exploded afterwards: porn spam bots (like bots, follow bots, reply bots) that just acted on keywords in your tweets and Russian disinformation bots that also act on keywords. It has gotten better the last few weeks with the various leaks and a Verfassungsschutz investigation in Germany that uncovered the "Doppelgänger" botnet, but it's still an absurd nuisance.
> In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing.
Well... and brands. Brands don't want their advertisements to appear next to someone showing the Nazi salute, calling for executions or whatever garbage they're pushing, and it is measurable both in financial data as well as in the quality of the ads - it used to be household brands, now it's mostly dropshipping, fake mobile game and cryptocurrency scams.
[1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1...