Honestly community notes is fantastic, there are a few other minor pluses and minuses, relevant portions of the community have left. I think I'm on No for the moment, but wouldn't be surprised to change my mind on that in the future.

@EvanDaniel I think the consensus (among most people) is that community notes are the best improvement to the site. Even I think that they're good, and I'm a VERY strong NO voter here.

@nottelling2ccc They're informative, important, de-escalatory, occasionally hilarious, simple. They could have existed years ago, any number of other sites could do something like them, there is lots of room for exploration and improvement in that space.

All around amazing, they worked far better than I was expecting.

This question is ambiguous. I think Twitter itself has become a worse platform to use, but that humanity as a whole is better off as a result. I voted No, since I felt that was more in the spirit of the question.

"Investment giant Fidelity believes its shares of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, are worth 71.5% less than when Musk first purchased the social media company in October 2022, according to a new securities filing."

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/02/tech/fidelity-again-trims-elon-musks-x-valuation/index.html

As someone who doesn't use the site, now or ever, my secondhand experience with the place has improved a lot. It's more entertaining, at least.

@AndrewHartman if you don't use the site how do you even see tweets? When people link a tweet I can see it about 50% of the time, and I can only see one.

Are we meant to base our answer on our personal experience on the site? Or on whether we think that the site as a whole has improved in terms of its impact on the world? or the experience of the average user?

@calderknight Your personal opinion.

I still don't forgive him for the very first thing he did (getting rid of captions under trending topics). It was simply a good quality of life feature.

Translate only works half of the time, and I follow too many non-english-speaking artists for that not to affect my experience negatively.

Scrolling through commens used to be, at the VERY minimum, slightly useful. Sometimes you'd see snappy comebacks, or useful information, or SOMETHING. Verified users being the only ones to appear means that you'll see maybe one or two half-decent comments, and then a wall of garbage. People tagging friends, or commenting "lol", or just regular spambots.

I am an openly nonbinary furry on the internet, with many lgbtq+ friends. Twitter has stopped banning people harrassing my friends and me. This has happened. It is not theoretical.

I am inundated with more requests to turn notifications on, to pay money, to use their chatbot. I can no longer block advertisements, and I'm getting one every four posts.

A number of really great accounts, such as Juniper's, have been nuked. A number of accounts I followed, such as NPR and a number of artists, have left the site - some of them quitting social media entirely.

My experience is just worse! It's significantly worse. Are there justifications? Probably! But the experience is worse for me, and I don't like it nearly as much.

@Marnix Adverts are a relatively easy fix if you're willing to make a few adjustments. I use UBlock Origin to block ads, and also this add-on too: https://github.com/ryanckulp/twitter_ad_blocker. The Orion browser on iOS lets you install add-ons from Firefox and Chrome's add-on stores, so this also can work on mobile.

@nottelling2ccc Sidenote: I don't always block advertisements on the web, but I don't think Twitter deserves me enabling ads on their site.

@nottelling2ccc That's the thing - I use ublock, and it's stopped working for some reason. Not sure what happened there

I promise not to argue -- I'd love to hear the reasoning behind the YES votes. It would get me out of my bubble for sure.

@ClubmasterTransparent Community notes (a collective fact checking mechanism, also applies to ads which can be hilarious), transparent algorithms (what determines which content gets floated to the top), monetisation of content (you can create your own subscription service and set your own price). In addition, not directly related to changes to the service itself, but when the twitter files were released and it became apparent that not just twitter but every social media platform were under the sway of the government, twitter/x now singularly occupies a category of social media companies who will not take down or sensor content unless it violates the law. To my mind this has shifted the entire dynamic of social media, you can now choose between the governmental-control flavoured ones, and the other.

Did that shift your bubble?

@ClashofColours Thanks for candid response.

@ClubmasterTransparent It would be better if the notes were treated like a standard reply that could themselves be replied to and upranked/downranked. And if I could block the account. Giving them a privileged spot is just another way for political infections to maintain control over topics which should be settled through logic.

Tweet: [Reasonable but unconventional point]

COMMUNITY NOTES: Actually [bad politically motivated research] refutes this, and [emotive, political, illogical statement]

I like X for the top 0.01% of its conversations in terms of developing ideas on important topics. Community Notes are not up to scratch, and pull the quality of these conversations down.

Still, under Elon X has unbanned many good users and has become more lenient about unconventional views and politically unpopular views, so it was an easy YES from me.

And Community Notes might even contribute to that YES, because this question is about the site as a whole, not just my personal experience on it.

Is that title right? Not "changed for the better"?

@Joshua Whoops, thanks! Fixed.