Blaming the last owner for Twitter’s problems is convenient, and it lets everybody who built the machine off the hook. The frustration users feel now has roots going back a decade, well before Elon Musk showed up.
The nostalgia around old Twitter is dishonest. People talk about it like a lost town square, when the record shows a place where a stranger could rally a mob against somebody over one clumsy sentence and the company mostly shrugged.
The platform still exists, rebranded as X. It still has hundreds of millions of users. Something fundamental shifted, not all at once and not because of one man, whatever the coverage says. For more, see Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts.
What was Twitter like before it became X?
Twitter launched in 2006 as a microblogging platform where users could post 140-character updates (later expanded to 280). It grew into something much bigger: a real-time news wire, a customer service channel, a networking tool, and a cultural commons where a teenager in Jakarta and the President of the United States could join the same conversation. For more, see shocking reasons why Yelp sucks.
At its peak, Twitter occupied a unique position no other platform could match.
It was faster than Facebook, more public than messaging apps, and more text-focused than Instagram. Journalists treated it as essential infrastructure. Activists organized movements on it. Brands used it for real-time customer engagement. For more, see brilliant ways to use your book with social media.
The platform had real strengths:
- Real-time breaking news faster than any traditional outlet
- Global reach across borders and demographics
- Hashtag-driven movements that sparked real social change
- Direct access to public figures, from CEOs to heads of state
- A character limit that forced concise, punchy communication
- A culture of wit, humor, and memes that made it entertaining
But the idea that Twitter was some golden platform before Musk acquired it doesn’t hold up. The problems ran deep.
Twitter Was Already a Cesspool
The rose-tinted view of pre-Musk Twitter ignores serious problems the platform never solved, and in several cases made worse.
Harassment was the norm. Trolls operated with near impunity, and the platform’s response ran from slow to nonexistent. Women, minorities, and anyone who drew the wrong kind of attention could count on coordinated pile-ons with almost no protection.
That’s the failure I find hardest to forgive. A platform that made its money from attention owed its users basic protection from being hunted, and Twitter treated the pile-on as somebody else’s problem for years.
I’ve watched it happen over and over. Somebody writes something, and then wham, wham, wham, they get hit again and again, all of it negative and all of it from people acting horribly. With Twitter, and really with all social media, you have to harden your spine and man up to it, or person up, or whatever the term is now.
On December 20, 2013, Justine Sacco, a corporate communications director at IAC, posted a joke about AIDS and race to her 170 Twitter followers and boarded an 11-hour flight to South Africa. While she was in the air, a Gawker editor retweeted it to his 15,000 followers, and the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended worldwide. When she landed, she found out what had happened and had a friend delete her account.
IAC announced that it had “parted ways with the employee in question,” according to Variety. Sacco later told Jon Ronson, for his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, that she never expected anyone to take the comment literally.
The joke was a bad one, and I’m not defending it. The scandal is that a woman with 170 followers became the whole internet’s entertainment for a night, and nothing in Twitter’s design did a thing to slow it down.
The algorithm rewarded outrage. The engagement model favored controversy, hot takes, and emotional reactions over substance. The more inflammatory the post, the wider the reach. That one design choice turned every conversation into a potential battlefield and made the platform exhausting.
This design choice angers me more than any single moderation call. Somebody decided rage was good for the numbers and built it into the machine, and every user paid for that decision in stress and wasted evenings.
Moderation was inconsistent and ideologically skewed. This was one of the platform’s most divisive problems. Twitter’s content moderation leaned noticeably left, and the evidence bears that out. Conservative accounts were suspended at far higher rates than liberal ones. Right before the 2020 election, the platform blocked users from sharing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Twitter’s own leadership later acknowledged that decision was wrong. The “Twitter Files” released after Musk’s acquisition showed internal teams making judgment calls that consistently broke in one direction. Call it bias or call it pattern-matching against a style of political speech. The effect was the same. A large share of users believed the platform was operating with a thumb on the scale.
Misinformation spread faster than corrections. False stories, conspiracy theories, and misleading claims traveled at light speed while accurate information limped behind. The structure rewarded speed over accuracy, and the moderation team couldn’t keep up.
Echo chambers flourished. The algorithm fed users content they already agreed with and built ideological bubbles where people rarely met an opposing view. The platform stopped feeling like a shared public square and started feeling like a set of hostile territories.
Basic features were missing for years. Users begged for an edit button for over a decade. The shift from chronological to algorithmic timelines took away any control over what they saw. Ads grew more intrusive. Privacy practices were questionable at best.
The edit button saga still makes me laugh, in the grim way. Users asked for one small, obvious feature for more than a decade, and the company acted like they’d asked for the moon.
The platform was broken well before October 2022. Musk inherited a mess.
What changed on Twitter under Elon Musk?
Musk completed his acquisition in October 2022 and started reshaping the platform immediately. He laid off over 6,000 of the company’s roughly 7,500 employees. In July 2023 he rebranded Twitter to X, scrapping a logo that ranked among the most recognized in tech history. He introduced Twitter Blue, now X Premium, and created a paid verification tier.
Some of the changes were needed.
What Musk got right:
- Exposing internal moderation bias through the Twitter Files gave users real insight into how content decisions were being made behind closed doors
- Reinstating accounts that had been banned for political speech instead of genuine policy violations addressed a real free speech concern
- Adding the edit button (for Premium users) finally answered a decade-old user demand
- Reducing some of the bureaucratic bloat that had made the company slow and unresponsive
- Community Notes, the crowd-sourced fact-checking system, has proven more effective and less politically biased than the old moderation approach
- Opening the algorithm’s recommendation code to public scrutiny increased transparency
What Musk got wrong:
- The rebranding from Twitter to X destroyed billions in brand equity for questionable strategic gain. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated a $2 to $5 billion loss in value.
- Gutting the workforce to under 40% of pre-acquisition staff created reliability problems and eliminated institutional knowledge
- The paid verification system (X Premium) undermined the original checkmark’s purpose as an identity verification tool, turning it into a pay-to-play status symbol
- Musk’s personal use of the platform (amplifying controversial content, moving cryptocurrency markets with his posts, and publicly feuding with critics) made X feel like his personal playground
- Content moderation swung from one extreme to another instead of finding a balanced middle ground. Hate speech spiked after the acquisition, and reinstating previously banned accounts included genuine bad actors alongside people who’d been unfairly silenced
- The “everything app” vision (messaging, payments, banking, commerce) remains vaporware years after being announced
- Compliance with government content removal requests increased under Musk, rising to 71% in 2024 compared to lower rates under previous management, undercutting the free speech branding
The result is a platform that traded one set of problems for another and never touched the underlying issues that made people say it sucked in the first place.
That’s my frustration with the ownership debate. People argue about which man ran the place as if a new boss could undo a business model built on outrage, and the design underneath kept doing what it was built to do.
The Numbers Tell the Story
X claims roughly 600 million monthly active users as of early 2025. The company stopped publishing regular metrics when it went private. The last official daily active user count was 237.8 million, in Q2 2022. Independent tracking puts mobile daily active users at around 132 million by late 2025, down roughly 15% year over year.
Engagement rates have been falling. This is part of my Social Media Hub, where I collect everything on the topic. Median engagement per post dropped from 0.03% in 2024 to 0.015% in 2025. The platform added only about 50 million users in the past year, while competitor Threads added 200 million in the same period.
Staffing has partially recovered, to roughly 2,840 employees by early 2025. That’s still under 40% of the pre-acquisition workforce.
The platform isn’t dying. It’s not growing the way its competitors are either, and the engagement numbers say the users who remain are doing less with it.
The decline, by the numbers
What changed at Twitter/X (through late 2025)
−$2-5B
Estimated loss in value (Wedbush)
−15%
Mobile daily users YoY, ~132M
50M vs 200M
New users added vs. Threads, same year
<40%
Of pre-acquisition staff remaining
The Press and X
The relationship between journalism and the platform has changed at the root. News organizations used Twitter for breaking news, audience reach, sentiment analysis, and direct communication with readers. For many journalists it was the single most important tool of the day.
That relationship has deteriorated from both directions. Under old Twitter, moderation choices left conservative journalists and outlets feeling targeted. Under Musk, the December 2022 suspension of mainstream journalists, including reporters from the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, on questionable “doxxing” claims, damaged trust with legacy media.
The core problem for media professionals is that the platform is now unreliable as a professional tool, whoever runs it. Your reach depends on an algorithm that shifts without warning. Your verification badge signals a subscription instead of editorial credibility. The usefulness for journalism erodes from both ends.
I feel for working journalists here. They built careers on a tool they never controlled, and now their reach depends on the mood of an algorithm they can’t see.
Where Are Twitter Users Going?
The market for alternatives has matured since 2023. The early ones didn’t stick. Clubhouse is all but dead, and Parler has shut down and relaunched several times. The real competition now comes from two platforms.
Threads (Meta): Launched in July 2023 and up to roughly 350-400 million monthly active users by early 2026. Tight integration with Instagram gives it a built-in audience and makes onboarding effortless. The downside is that it’s a Meta product, with all the data privacy baggage that implies. Supports up to 500 characters per post and five-minute videos. Engagement exists but runs lower than smaller platforms.
Bluesky: A decentralized platform originally incubated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Around 40 million users as of late 2025, far smaller than X or Threads, and the user base is passionate and highly engaged. Bluesky users are roughly three times more likely to engage with a post than X users. The customization is serious: custom feeds, user-created algorithms, and heavy-duty blocking tools including community-maintained blocklists. It’s especially popular among tech-savvy users, creatives, and people who left X over the Musk changes.
Mastodon: The original decentralized alternative. It still exists with a dedicated user base, but its complexity has kept it from mainstream adoption. No ads, strong privacy, chronological timeline, steep learning curve.
X still leads in daily usage, especially among older users. The margin is narrowing at the other end, with Gen Z and Millennials splitting their time across platforms.
Is Twitter still worth an author’s time?
X was already flawed before Musk bought it, and his ownership has fixed some things and broken others. Old Twitter had a harassment problem, an outrage-reward algorithm, and a moderation team that leaned one ideological direction. Musk’s X has more transparency in some areas and a new set of problems: brand confusion, staffing instability, inconsistent moderation in the opposite direction, and a leader who can’t resist using the platform as his personal megaphone.
The users who say “Twitter sucks” aren’t wrong.
They’ve been right for longer than most of them realize. The problems didn’t start in October 2022. They started years earlier, baked into the design, the business model, and the people running it. Musk changed the management. He hasn’t changed the dynamics that make the platform exhausting.
Whether the “everything app” vision ever materializes is an open question. Meanwhile users have options they didn’t have before, and more of them are taking those options seriously.
My verdict is that Twitter was a hostile place long before the rebrand and it still is. I wouldn’t build anything important on it, and if you’ve been blaming yourself for how exhausted it leaves you, stop, because that exhaustion is what the design produces.
Frequently Asked Questions
The book on this: Sins of the Internet is 168 pages on what the platforms did to the people using them, including how a place for conversation turns into something else. When a platform turns on someone, a book is one place to tell your side with a ghostwriter.
I spent about a month experimenting with X in late 2024, and what I found was mostly spam. There’s very little value there. If you stumble into the right group and meet the right people, you can get something out of it, but finding those people is hard. Meanwhile I was getting about a hundred messages a day from accounts inviting me to their porn sites. No, thank you.
