X 17+

I am a professional ceramic sculptor and have had 17 Instagram accounts deactivated on false reports, mod bias, and hackings, so to say I cherish the freedom on this platform not found elsewhere is an understatement. However, Twitter has put other restrictions on my account that arose from nowhere, probably due to competitors and their incessant spam of reports in attempts to get my work taken down so that theirs can appear like the original. Three stars because due to their 30 day policy of account deactivation prior to deletion, an account with almost 2K followers was accidentally deleted with me forgetting to re-login while overseas. It also doesn’t make the platform look good to have users who post content that gets hits elsewhere be unable to grow a following like before on their platform. I’ve been back on Twitter with a new account (post ig deactivation of an account) for 3 months, post several times a day each day, and have only around 50 followers due to my account not being searchable and the professional option removed and no way to appeal and reach support. If these issues can be fixed, naturally the app rating could be as well.

Twitter was already not that great, but it feels as if it has gotten worse over the last few months. All you see now are far-right extremist talking heads, Elon’s sycophants, or the most annoying scam bots for t-shirts, porn, and crypto. Elon says this is the “digital town square”, but honestly he’s just constantly propping up known racists, conspiracy theorists, and maniacs. Now that these creators can be paid based on comment counts, ads etc we’re seeing these creators up the ante in just how insane their posts are getting in order to cause further reach. I went from using this app regularly to maybe checking once a week and have been playing with the idea of just deleting my account in general. Changed the name to X which is just stupid, changed the API policy which makes 3rd party apps totally useless, and anyone who knew what they were doing either quit or was fired. Paying for the app feels pointless as it honestly doesn’t do anything for you other than you have a check mark, which you can hide btw because they realized people were getting laughed at for subscribing to Twitter. The alleged benefits aren’t worth the money. Editing can only be done within a specific window after posting the tweet, and you get 2FA through text. All in all it just isn’t a very engaging or interesting app unless you feel like laughing at goofy people, and even then it gets old quickly.

I have had Twitter since 2008. Longer than I’ve been an Apple user. It has gone downhill. Elon‘s politics aside. The app is far less stable than it used to be. I often have to refresh three or four times to see my notifications. I now need to pay or download a third-party app in order to use two factor authentication that I had been using for years and years. The advertisements have gotten steadily scam here and scummier.

Worst of all from a user perspective the content is worse. Not only is there a constant flood of bot interactions, but favoring “verified” users means that every tweet you care about has 15 to 20 unrelated replies from bots that pay the $15 a month to try and chase down either more traffic or direct payouts. It’s like the algorithm has been completely reworked to favor, low value, engagement farming.

I’ll see a tweet about some thing I care about like some Geo political event happening and then underneath it I’ll look and there will be 25 replies and 20 of them will be videos of cute animals or pictures of scantily clad girls, or stock trading advice. Then there will be a few responses to the tweet that actually matter scattered into the bottom. And finally Twitter, we’ll stop serving responses and show me tweets “that might interest you” and it will be more of the same completely unrelated content.