Personally I'd consider it an improvement, but that might be because of my naive assumption that people will finally stop mistaking twitter for a sensible way of communicating.
I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" and his whole rhetorical take on it needing to be a place for free and open discussion as per the "market place of ideas" concept (I don't recall him referencing the quoted term directly- that's my editorial).
Like... we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I never had a Twitter account, but isn't it still limited to some 200 characters and/or an image per post? And from what I've seen the "threading" of discussions also seems to make replies difficult to follow. Apparently, our society wants important social issues to be discussed in 200 character snippets. I'm going to go cry into my coffee.
Relax, broad social discourse has never been particularly nuanced or long-form, and has always been partially driven by catch phrases, headlines, and incisive, memorable quotes.
Twitter makes it impossible to dig in replies past a very low number of them. Hell, if the tweet is not the last in a chain, you often can't see any replies at all. It is explicitly optimized for very different things than public discussion.
That's not really how it works. The most important tweets are links to long-form discussions. It's a discovery platform. Sometimes the poster will include an executive summary in a thread. That's helpful, too, for deciding if you want to follow the link.
A lot of academics are on twitter, and it's a reasonably good way to find interesting new work. It has problems, but the character limit isn't one of them.
The market place of ideas that fit within a tweet, which is a pretty limited set of ideas. Most of the ideas Elon has don't fit into a tweet, almost nothing of value does.
Its not so much that twitter is a sensible way of communicating its that twitter gives you such wide access to such a massive array of people and topics. For example its how I get my news, I just follow a ton of journalists from different companies and countries. As 1:1 communication you are right its not built for that but it does what I use it for really well.
