One needs to tease apart the effects of Musk and Musk's "policies" on advertising investments, number of users, the boom and slow decline of social media platforms (see Facebook, Instagram coming down from their peak, TikTok gaining ground, but people seem to be already tired of it and waiting for something new) and the technical/technological part of the enterprise.

I don't like layoffs, in particular when I am the one getting laid off (not at X), but the X experience, for a casual user like me, did not get worse, if it did, because there are way fewer people working at X. One may say, I don't like the algos, but that's not coming from a lack of engineers, it is a policy.

a lot of the people laid off from X were working on content on things like moderation, and yes, the algorithm

Is the site functional? Sure, I guess. I think the amount of traffic shrinking also has something to do with the viability with fewer engineers

I don’t think it is true at all.

The recommendation algorithm they implement is a choice they make, it is not that if they had more engineers they would deploy a “better” one.

Every recommendation algorithm is, in the end, “bad” in some way.

The TikTok algorithm was considered the non plus ultra among recommendation algos; now you cannot watch a video of a cat on TikTok for more than 5 seconds that the next 50 videos they serve you are of cats.

The Netflix recommendation algorithm has not shown something to me that I considered hidden but interesting in years. They just show you whatever they want to push, mostly (I worked there).

You buy a pan to cook steaks on Amazon and, for some reason, the algorithm recommends to buy it along with stroboscopic lights.

I didn't say they were all working on the algorithm, there were a lot of people working in various content-related jobs: moderation, algorithm, partnership management with content creators, ad sales, and more

Without getting into a she-said/he-said debate, I don't believe traffic is shrinking because of the viability of fewer engineers.

If that were the case, it would also be easy to hire hundreds more. With the confusing mix of X.ai, Grok, and SpaceX, I don't think anyone would notice.

X seems to be much more relevant to social and political debate than any other social media platform, which, despite a declining user base, makes it an extremely valuable tool for Musk and his circle.

It may seem like I'm defending or supporting Musk, but that's not my point. What I can say is that Musk made a huge bet when he substantially, even dramatically, reduced X's workforce, and I think he won that particular bet.

As a casual user, I don’t think it works any worse than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok.

I remember that for years people complained about DMs in Twitter being “broken” and without any search function.

Exactly, Twitter was known as a rock solid platform before. It even had a mascot for reliability, in the form of a whale.

Social media has just gotten way worse across the board. X is just a reflection of trend.

i've been using twitter/x since 2007 and it has not gotten way worse -- specially if you try comparing to truly bad era of the #failwhale.

So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.

And it's all preposterously even when it's working.

*preposterously slow

X has added more useful functionality in the last year or two than twitter did in their entire existence, it is also much snappier and reliable, that's with 5% of the workforce. I don't put this down to AI though it's more like a very lean, talented and motivated teams without layers of pointless middle people. Add AI into the mix and it's naturally going to be the way forward. Companies that stay bloated and not utilising AI will die.