I've been a Twitter user for over 5 years, and an admirer for many more.<p>The branding, the minimalism, high-quality content, and text-emphasis - all of it used to feel great!<p>Things were actually good in the pre-Elon era. Or stable, to say the least.<p>While the users are still there and will most likely continue to be, I miss Twitter as it was already.
I don't like the concept of an 'everything app'. It seems diluted and non-focused on what Twitter actually is/was: a microblogging platform. Now I see walls of text and diatribes completely lacking wit and brevity because we're now spoiled with more characters. The witty things you could inject into a 280 char tweet are now gone. Sometimes, constraints are good, and encourage creativity.<p>Another pain point: we can't say 'she/he tweeted that', we have to say they x'd it which is awkward and annoying.
Since I created my account in 2009, nothing really happened on Twitter week-to-week, month-to-month, even year-to-year. Fundamentally, the site was mostly the same, and most new updates were either logical or non-important.<p>We went from using a third-party service to upload photos (TwitPic) to being able to upload directly to Twitter. And we'd go from having a certain shade of blue, to a different shade of blue; or the icons changed to be slightly thicker and redesigned, to contrast better. Nothing interesting. The only real "shocking" change came when tweets went from 140 characters to 280 a few years back, and then early last year Twitter announced that you'd be able to edit tweets. Those two things, in my view, were the biggest changes pre-Elon.<p>Now Elon owns it, and a lot of things are changing, like paying for verification, prioritizing paid users in replies, disabling Direct Messaging from free accounts by default, and other changes that, in my view, are geared more towards short-term profits as opposed to long-term platform trust and survival.<p>But overall, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the service. I get the news on there faster than anywhere else. Twitter's got a great secret sauce in their algorithm that has yet to be destroyed. The moment I can't get immediate useful information from there, I'm not going to use it nearly as much. Until then, change the logo all you like...
On and off since around when Trent Reznor first joined- funny I only lasted a little longer than he did post Elon.<p>I didn't think I cared but I kind of do. It is sad Elon is such a disappointment, but that's not new and I'd moved on. The rebrand is sad because it feels really dead, now. Twitter was fun once.
I started as a beta tester in 2006, took a two year break and then used it extensively until 2011. By that time most of the people I liked had left, but I retained one of my alts until around 2019 when I finally closed the account.<p>For reasons I don't quite understand, I can't close the @retrocryptid account. Which seems weird. I created it a while ago when I thought having the same name on numerous services was important, but it was never my primary account. I'm not sure what I did or didn't do to disallow me from deactivating the account.<p>I couldn't care less about the rebrand.
I was a Twitter user from 2007-2022; I bailed out around the time Saint Car started purging journalists, though briefly returned for a joke when mention of the dread term 'mastodon' was banned. While I was quite annoyed to lose Twitter, I think the ill-thought-out rebrand is _extremely_ funny, and look forward to his realising that he doesn't have anything sensible to call retweets. Or, er, Twitter video.<p>We are seeing the _worst rebrand in all of history_ unfold in real time, before our eyes. There's something special in that.
I've been on Twitter since 2007. Elon is clearly and purposefully destroying it. I'm not happy about the changes. I'll probably stop using it soon.
As mentioned in other HN threads, recently twitter has changed everyone's message settings so you are much less likely to be able to send someone a private message and now requires people to log in to read it.<p>That is is very inconvenient.<p>The only aspect of the rebrand that I care about is that they are wasting a second of my time showing the new logo full-screen when a page loads.
The nazis, racists, TERFs, rapist pimps, and misogynists bother me. Claiming U+1d54f is a logo when Twitter has globe-spanning brand recognition is just an epic fuckup, but it's not offensive.