It's a shame that Musk's politics are a distraction from the ways that Twitter has become hostile and worse for non-political reasons. That was the first place I became aware of hyperlinks causing posts to get hidden or downranked.

To be fair, Twitter was always making terrible product decisions. They were just doing it with 3x the staff and spending back then.

The book "Hatching Twitter" is a pretty eye-opening history of Twitter from the very beginning. If true, Twitter pre-Elon was run by people with strange product opinions, in a fairly dysfunctional, ineffective way. Jack Dorsey, who comes across as a grade-A weirdo in the book, was first pushed out and later reinstalled in a palace coup.

One could argue the two (Musk's politics and Twitter's actions) are related

X's algorithm no longer downranks for using links.

Extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary evidence. Also, as a layman outside their system, how can you verify this?

The owner of the site said so https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2082273378749268440 and it is backed by the open source algorithm they released.

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm