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.

Amazon Music

I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can’t even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.

I’ve actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It’s kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.

I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.