Twitter’s direct messages are the best aspect of Twitter, so of course the new Twitter leadership decided to make it worse by automatically opting-in everyone to the setting that only allows messages from verified users. This is the reason why I’ve subscribed to Twitter Premium but I’ve just canceled my subscription and I’ll stop using Twitter.
The “For You” feed is basically a 1:1 copy of TikTok these days. Just an endless stream of viral photos and videos designed to addict me as much as possible to stay doomscrolling. This is why I’ve been mostly using lists, but I’m tired of switching to a list view every time I refresh because that resets the feed to “For You”.
I still love the Internet and I will never stop considering it magical. The fact that we can have instant two-way communication with anyone in the world, for free, is simply amazing. Discovering interesting people is the best part of it.
That said, I can’t remember the last time I discovered someone interesting on Twitter and they are of course making this more difficult by removing the ability to see who liked a tweet. Maybe it’s because I’m in that category as well, but I consider accounts with less than 1000 followers the most interesting and conversational. And it’s insanely hard to find these accounts, because they aren’t popular. (Finding interesting personal blogs suffers from the same problem.)
A better approach for discovery has been just surfing the web like in the good old days before social media. And the web comes with its own, superior form of “direct message”: email. And this approach doesn’t bombard me with 10-seconds long video clips, no, it’s text-based, just like the old Twitter.