I think anyone who thinks otherwise either curated it to be awful or didn’t really use it at all.
. . . or was targeted by harassment campaigns that the company did a poor job of protecting against. Plenty of celebrities and political actors realized they could weaponize their fanbases to go after critics, and Twitter never did much to stop it. For public officials or organizations, twitter too often was a cesspool of abuse that they couldn’t afford to leave, and that was messed up. (I think the balance has shifted now, that they can afford to leave and have a moral obligation to do so, but many haven’t.)
I always enjoyed my twitter experiences, because like you, I curated a nice feed to follow (and used a browser to keep on chronological timeline). But I was just a follower, mostly, and was never targeted by the really nasty stuff. But I’m not so myopic as to declare that what worked for me wasn’t awful for many other folks.
. . . or was targeted by harassment campaigns that the company did a poor job of protecting against. Plenty of celebrities and political actors realized they could weaponize their fanbases to go after critics, and Twitter never did much to stop it. For public officials or organizations, twitter too often was a cesspool of abuse that they couldn’t afford to leave, and that was messed up. (I think the balance has shifted now, that they can afford to leave and have a moral obligation to do so, but many haven’t.)
I always enjoyed my twitter experiences, because like you, I curated a nice feed to follow (and used a browser to keep on chronological timeline). But I was just a follower, mostly, and was never targeted by the really nasty stuff. But I’m not so myopic as to declare that what worked for me wasn’t awful for many other folks.
Twitter was no worse in that regard than any social media site until the 2016 election.
2016 was 8 years ago, that means by your definition twitter spent nearly half it’s existence as a toxic cesspool