Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s frustrating because some of Musk’s first moves were to make logged-out Twitter a ton better, but then a while ago he reversed course hard and made it entirely unusable. It’s the worst it’s ever been, I’m not employing “unusable” flippantly, it’s in fact almost pointless to follow a Twitter link while logged out now. Yeah, in my circle if people want to share Twitter stuff, they’ve taken to using screenshots.
I've stopped sharing Twitter links at this point and just send screenshots to people. I can never know if they have a Twitter account. He supposedly did this to stop "bots."
For an anonymous viewer, they still don't show you the rest of a thread a tweet is in, or even any indication of the fact that there is a thread that you're not seeing. This doesn't even make sense as a nudge to join Twitter, so load reduction feels like the most likely reason to me.