Twitter was extremely valuable to me pre-Musk. I followed a lot of creative and technical people doing work I felt was great or valuable, and often it gave me insight into trends well before they occurred. It also made accessible brief discussions with people who normally were difficult to reach.
My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.
Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.
Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.
Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.
This was during the same era that you had many people losing their jobs or reputations because of outrage mobs on the platform. I wouldn't claim that Twitter had no positive aspects at all, but that the negatives far outweighed the positive. (and yes, the outrage mobs are at least just as bad, potentially worse, but just pointed at different targets.)
The toxicity that you're decrying was also there before, maybe just not in your circles or aimed at you.
Frankly I always felt like the "outrage mobs" were almost always consequences catching up to people who did bad things. In a few cases sure it wasn't, but in most cases it was just jerks upset they couldn't just use their power to get away with their behavior.
I remember some of the uproar from tech folks getting criticism in that era. They were mad at things like articles coming out about toxic workplace culture at startups, or reports on pseudo-fraudulent behavior at startups. Many of those people said stuff like "defend founders". Years later those same people who whined about consequences were some of the first to also buy into crypto scams and use their power to try to pressure people into hyping up and not criticizing crypto.
That behavior made me very cynical about a lot of the VC world and much of tech in general. In general I wish those people had more reputational damage for using their public presence to push tribalism in pursuit of power or scamming people of their money.
My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.
Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.
Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.
Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.