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Twitter is noticeably worse for me. About 40% of the time the app is in a state in which no images or videos will load. It's full of bots, which I never noticed before. I get follow requests from bots several times a week, even though I have a private account and have never posted anything.
There are more ads and oftentimes I am shown the same ad three or four times in a row. The recommendation algorithm sometimes does weird things. Recently, about a third of the recommended Tweets were in Turkish. I don't speak a word of Turkish.
I do like that there is less censorship, but I don't believe for a second that firing so many people hasn't caused serious problems.
Other companies that have done mass layoffs are having similar problems, though not as severe. Most software I use has gotten worse lately. Facebook Messenger is especially bad.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I myself have noticed different problems on different accounts. On my main, where I spend 99% of my time on Twitter (and where I post), I do experience BOT interactions (follows, likes, DMs, but not replies), but the difference between how it is now versus how it was in this regard is a difference in degree, not kind. It is definitely worse than it was, but it's not insanely worse. The ads are different, and I noticed that some ads are even unlabeled, that is, they don't tell you that they're ads. Another thing with ads is that some of them don't handle UI interactions in kind with other tweets. For example, some ads instantly open the in-app browser whereas on a normal tweet the same interaction would be interpreted as part of a scroll action. I have never experienced the foreign language thing, that's truly odd.
On my private account that I created after Elon took over, on which I don't post and only follow a few accounts, I get 2-3 BOT follow requests per day. It's weird. Also, I had to solve like 12 captchas just to sign up; I thought that was funny.
I guess it comes down to what you attribute to the mass layoffs vs. what you attribute to Elon's sense of product and product management. I think a lot of the bad things we're seeing are due to the latter, not the former.
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