The branding, the minimalism, high-quality content, and text-emphasis - all of it used to feel great!
Things were actually good in the pre-Elon era. Or stable, to say the least.
While the users are still there and will most likely continue to be, I miss Twitter as it was already.
Another pain point: we can't say 'she/he tweeted that', we have to say they x'd it which is awkward and annoying.
We went from using a third-party service to upload photos (TwitPic) to being able to upload directly to Twitter. And we'd go from having a certain shade of blue, to a different shade of blue; or the icons changed to be slightly thicker and redesigned, to contrast better. Nothing interesting. The only real "shocking" change came when tweets went from 140 characters to 280 a few years back, and then early last year Twitter announced that you'd be able to edit tweets. Those two things, in my view, were the biggest changes pre-Elon.
Now Elon owns it, and a lot of things are changing, like paying for verification, prioritizing paid users in replies, disabling Direct Messaging from free accounts by default, and other changes that, in my view, are geared more towards short-term profits as opposed to long-term platform trust and survival.
But overall, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the service. I get the news on there faster than anywhere else. Twitter's got a great secret sauce in their algorithm that has yet to be destroyed. The moment I can't get immediate useful information from there, I'm not going to use it nearly as much. Until then, change the logo all you like...
I didn't think I cared but I kind of do. It is sad Elon is such a disappointment, but that's not new and I'd moved on. The rebrand is sad because it feels really dead, now. Twitter was fun once.
For reasons I don't quite understand, I can't close the @retrocryptid account. Which seems weird. I created it a while ago when I thought having the same name on numerous services was important, but it was never my primary account. I'm not sure what I did or didn't do to disallow me from deactivating the account.
I couldn't care less about the rebrand.
We are seeing the _worst rebrand in all of history_ unfold in real time, before our eyes. There's something special in that.
That is is very inconvenient.
The only aspect of the rebrand that I care about is that they are wasting a second of my time showing the new logo full-screen when a page loads.