For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.

So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.

The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.

So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.

If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.

I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.

Is it? I've only ever used X on my phone through Brave. But always logged in, though.

They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything

What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.

So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...