Complaints about Twitter, sorry I mean X under Elon Musk are numerous. Beyond whatever increasingly unhinged societal views Musk expresses as well as the increase in outwardly sexual content that seems to be promoted by its proprietor there are several reasons why the platform has become increasingly useless to someone like me who is in the media landscape.

• Opening links to places which I have existing paid subscriptions to has become almost impossible from here. In my case, WaPo, NYT, WSJ,Telegraph, Bloomberg, The Atlantic & various Substacks including my own Beyond the 90′.
• Tagging people, finding them if they’re not some pop celebrity, politician or verified blue check-mark has become more difficult, even if you follow each other.
• If you don’t shorten links engagement goes down – I have tested this for months. If you post a direct link to a post here or on a Substack hosted site, views are perennially lower than if you shorten your link. and even then they are lower than if you add a picture. Otherwise tweets get lost. I’ve put a great deal of time, effort and money into building my site, Beyond the 90′ on Substack and attaching multiple newsletters with several different writers to it. But now Twitter seems to automatically discriminate against ANY link from Substack since that platform launched its own internal notes app which allows creators to share content within the Substack network.
• Twitter no longer supports this platform, WorldPress.
• This is not to mention Musk’s own claims of a “Global Public Square” are undermined by the elitist practice of selling monthly memberships which is going to favor the wealthier among us.

I am not a techie so I don’t know why much of this has happened, but it has happened and beyond the obvious conversations about the political polarization related to this platform, These are real practical problems for me as someone who is in the media and depends on a certain level of engagement. Anyway these are my concerns.

But the reality is this – if you’re not trying to throw out sexual content or wild extreme political takes (which means far left or far right stuff) and are looking for thoughtful engagement Twitter is increasingly useless as a platform. I’m not someone who has ever done LinkedIn or Instagram and I have a bad relationship with Facebook (I never quite figured out how it worked) so I was probably more Twitter-dependent than most. It’s simplicity and seeming egalitarianism were virtues. But that’s all gone these days.