> Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings.

How are you doing that now?

> Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.

Bad news: Musk is doing plenty of that. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...