The discourse it generates is inherently combative and primed for culture war. Which is true of most social media but for twitter's structure it's also literally nothing else. It's only the follower count, only the quote-reply, only the callout. No other intrinsic value.

If we exclude Musk, no, it's not worse than Instagram. Musk is a pretty big deal tho. Now, the Zucc is pretty evil too, so anyway I'd say Instagram and Facebook are fair contenders for worst platform.

Personally I deleted Twitter as soon as the purchase by Elongated Muskrat was confirmed. I deleted Facebook and Instagram more recently (I hesitated longer because I was using it more to communicate with irl acquaintances). I still use WhatsApp, until I can get some people I need to keep in contact with to start using Signal or Telegram (I know I'm not gonna get them on Matrix or xmpp, not worth trying), but it's also owned by the Zucc so it bothers me to keep using it.

We're noy excluding Elon, because he pushes fashist shit.

For me Mastodon is better than Twitter ever was, you can have real social interactions there, Twitter had too many people shouting for attention. I believe more by the day that smaller social media is better.

Everyone good left and the algorithm shows you a bunch of shit about how male loneliness is because women who don't want to fuck op are allowed outside.

128 character limit meant it was always just going to be bumper sticker style communication, and little else.

Media loves it because it's nothing but proverbial soundbites, completely decontextualized from any greater meaning.

People love it because people love shouting meaningless slogans and quotes and pretending they are the epitome of depth of meaning, belief, and argumentation.

It's stupid because it was designed for stupid people.

It's always been a cesspool of short messages.

Cant really have meaningful message in 144 characters on a platform like that.

Plus it's never been good at moderation.

Edit: Said much better by AskewLord here.

No one should use Twitter because of their algorithm alone. All the networks have unhealthy algorithms but Twitter is the most concerning considering Musk’s views and desire to push them on his users.

It is bad because what happened with Elon could happen in the first place.

One person can control it and do what he likes with it, that's bad

Like with all social media - it's as bad as you make it.

I've never had much of an issue with Twitter's recommendation algorithms. I find they do a pretty good job of showing me content I'm actually interested in. I did get an influx of political content during the owner switch, but either they fixed that on their end or it quickly figured out that I'm not interested. I'm getting none anymore. Like literally zero.

Lemmy would be equally unusable without heavy curating and content filters.

social media is bad in general. niche ones tend to be a bit better.

Twitter and Instagram are both bad and the people running them are an important part of that. Leadership is inherently a major part of how things are run and cannot be excluded.