My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.
Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.
Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.
I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.
The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.
Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.
Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.
As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.
It was not a Jenner joke: "The Babylon Bee's Man of the Year Is Rachel Levine" was the tweet that got them banned. Cringey but not remotely ban-worthy imho.
The context being that USA Today had celebrated Levine as one of its "Women of the Year".
Or as the Babylon Bee put it:
"Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Far too blasphemous for Twitter's censors at the time.
For all its problems, X is undisputedly the place with the most diverse range of viewpoints and interesting people.
It seems that this author wants more diversity of thought but also starts the article out decrying X for unbanning accounts that he disagrees with.
Kind of difficult to have diversity of thought if you ban diversity of thought.