The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.
I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.
xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.
When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle.
They still hate Musk though.
Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
> they all blocked each other in the purity battle
I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.
We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).
I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?
> Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people
I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.
Listening to Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" podcast I was distinctly struck with the idea that the main thing leftists like to do, even more than fighting rightists, is fighting other leftists.
My (literally, and self-proclaimed) communist former partner noted left-wing infighting. The Monty Python Life of Brian scene about The Popular Front of Judea ("he's over there") are, according to her, totally accurate in spirit.
Ironic, the right does strength through unity, the left talks about it and then argues with itself about who else used the phrase; the last time the left really did it was when trade unions still had teeth.
Basically the gist of it is that if you want to be "on the left", you need to have the exact, correct, and up to date opinion on every single micro-issue or you're literally a fascist hitler paedophile and will be ostracized.
Meanwhile "on the right" as long as you agree on maybe one or two bigger things and you can deal with or tolerate the rest while you move on with winning elections.
> People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
Expressing feelings and staying assertions are two different things. If you go around saying the sky is red and someone asks you for the source, it's not reasonable to throw a tantrum while desperately trying to move the goalpost by weaseling around with excuses such as "well aktchualy it feels red to me" nonsense.
If you make a statement, own it. If you are caught peddling baseless bullshit don't complain about being caught, complain about mindlessly posting baseless bullshit.
Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
The whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.