
Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow - Devolver
https://exponents.co/the-pulse-of-the-planet-flatlined/
======
blizkreeg
Has anyone considered that one of the main reasons for Twitter's lack of
growth is that the product in itself is opaque to most users? Unless you have
a following, there's no such thing as a "friend network" on Twitter. The
product is not social, contrary to what most people think. It's a boring,
lonely existence on Twitter if you're not a somebody and don't have the time
or personality to become one. It's a niche product, a niche that happens to be
300M MAUs (I think they should measure "monthly engaged users" and the number
would actually look much worse) and no more. Unless they make the product
inherently _social_ and appealing to a broader set of people, I don't see them
growing this number, no matter how they slice and dice it.

The argument the writer makes is a valid one but just a hypothesis. You can't
say for sure if that was the reason. Developers are not sprinting to build
apps on Instagram and Snapchat but both are growing like wildfire. A social
network needs to _be social_ , feel social, and make you feel like you have
friends who want to listen to your drivel on it.

For all you know, Ev might have turned it into a "pulse of the planet" and it
would've still failed to be social and/or make money. Also, we're talking of a
2009 meeting that talks of his ambition, that's |7| years ago - ample time for
it to have gone astray in a different direction.

~~~
harry8
Curating your own newspaper and never even tweeting once yourself is a
compelling, amazing and totally underrated use of Twitter. Any issue of
particular interest to you, follow as many of the key players and observers
who tweet and get all the important stories, not just one newspaper's. And all
the reaction to those stories. It is only for adults who are capable of
assessing a source. If that's you it's amazing. The brevity is it's strength.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Just about any story about Twitter mixes people who don't get it and then
people who rave about it.

Perhaps it's just a different way of getting news. If there's a topic that is
interesting, it's much easier to find a niche subreddit to follow or go
straight to the source. I don't know what experts or subject areas avoids the
inevitable "now let's show how clever we are", "share our personal life
incessantly", or "argue with some Internet idiot over something really dumb
with 140 characters".

If one of those experts has something really interesting to say, it's not the
Tweet, it's a blog post, it's a site, etc that will bubble up through other
sources already curated and Twitter can be skipped. Again, it's very possible
there are specific subjects where it's great, but personally have yet to find
them. I've never seen a Tweet that had value by itself and the site adds
nothing of value to my Internet experience. I hate it when people link to
tweets because you wonder what can really be said in that medium which isn't
just some witty retort.

Do people just consume the net differently?

~~~
Chathamization
It really depends on what you're looking for. For instance, twitter can be
good for niche areas. There's no subreddit for local politics in most places;
even places that have one don't have one that's very active (look at the NYC
politics subreddit). But it's easy to follow a few local reporters,
politicians, and activists on Twitter to get a sense of what's happening.

It's also quite useful for up to date information. If I'm trying to find
updates about what's happening at an even - especially if I'm trying to find
information from multiple sources - Twitter is often the best venue. If I'm
trying to find a summary of what happened days later, yeah, a blog post or
article would probably be better.

Of course, you can emulate some of the functionality of what Twitter does on
other platforms. But the same can be said for most of the web. Blogs are a
good example - I'd argue that it'd be much easier to use a personal web page
from 1994 to emulate what a blog does than it would be to use a blog to
emulate what Twitter does.

------
ramblenode
I guess I just don't understand the premise of these articles questioning why
something has stopped growing as though growth is the natural state of an
already large market. Is it a forgone conclusion that the core product is so
appealing it should just keep growing forever until everyone is consuming it?
Is it possible that no matter who is or was running Twitter that there would
only ever be so many people who want to communicate in hashtags and 180
characters? That a large part of Twitter's growth trajectory was from novelty
and network effects of semi-engaged users? That user engagement from tweeting
has a shelf life on the scale of months to years and that attrition is/was
inevitable no matter how many third party APIs and pink bows you wrap a tweet
up in? I'm asking in earnest because I just don't understand why the simpler
explanation is that tweeting will only ever appeal to so many people and that
there is a middle ground between failure and dominating the world. Somehow the
talk of CEOs and corporate visions overshadows the product itself--one that
has barely changed since its inception--which to me seems like the obvious
place to start questioning.

~~~
quickben
It depends who you ask.

As an example of sane analysis: I played WOW and Blizzard at one point said
something to the extent of: we have 12.5 m players, we captured the entire
market.

Then, you have usually the pr/marketing types that go after: _every_ human
being on this planet can be our user. Which is delusional.

Add to that the fact that most IPOs and VCs go after users and not much else
(was it $20-$40 per user?), And you end up in the current state where
everybody _hopes_ so hard that it obscures judgement.

So, your understanding is just fine. Things have limits and Twitter may be at
it.

~~~
FussyZeus
I'd like to add to this that it's incredibly sad/frustrating when a product
like Twitter especially (Don't mean to pick on them but it's such a good
example of this) is blown totally out of proportion in terms of what is
should/could be a very straightforward, API heavy, (I think) nerd-centric
product into some kind of bastardized Facebook with a character limit that is
for some reason worked on by almost four thousand people.

If Twitter had stuck to reasonable goals, kept the product more or less where
it started and stuck to a small team, they'd be printing money. Now we never
know if they're going to make it out of the year.

------
anovikov
Maybe it is failing to grow for the plain reason that it has already grew up,
filling its niche? Why don't you question why BMW is 'failing to grow'? What's
their mistake?

[http://www.nada.com/b2b/Portals/0/assets/web-
images/Luxury%2...](http://www.nada.com/b2b/Portals/0/assets/web-
images/Luxury%20Brand%20Performance%20BMW%20Blog%20II.jpg)

There is no mistake. There are only so many premium car buyers in the world.

By the IT measures, Twitter is a mature company. It does one thing and it does
it well. It can't grow infinitely.

~~~
nimchimpsky
I use it everyday, its great, it also has 2 billion revenue (?).

I don't understand the hate for them.

~~~
lmm
There are lots of subtle and not-so-subtle design aspects that mean Twitter
nudges people into arguments and bullying (not by accident per se, but rather
as a result of optimising for "engagement" and not thinking about what that
translates into). I don't mind there being sites out there on the Internet
that are not for me, but twitter is contributing to the polarisation of
society, especially when politicians start taking it seriously.

~~~
nimchimpsky
> twitter is contributing to the polarisation of society

seems a bit harsh, polarisation how ?

~~~
lmm
In the sense of politics shifting towards the extremes and people having less
productive discussion but getting more polemical.

~~~
anovikov
What could be a productive discussion in today's political situation? There is
no 'common good' answer to conservative vs liberal choice. It depends - good
for who? Conservative is good for passive majority (remember Luddites - you
could laugh at them now, but they never recovered to pre-mechanisation living
standards. it took 4 generations to do so, until post-WWI times). Liberal is
good for active minority. There can't be agreement - it is either us, or them
win. That's a polarization, and Twitter can't make it better, or much worse.

------
chjohasbrouck
Maybe this has been said already, but one major problem with Twitter is that
by default, the average person will publish and share content on it that's a
complete waste of time and of no value to anybody.

The average unit of content shared by a user on Instagram or Snapchat is
vastly more entertaining and relevant, and I think they achieve that by being
more visual. Those platforms are image- and video-first, and they have all
kinds of image and video filters. If we gave those tools to a monkey, it would
produce something worth sharing.

The quality of their content is enforced inherently by the tools they provide
you to share with.

Facebook achieves the same in a different way, by tightly integrating with
your identity and social circles.

Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control. Tweets are just
words with little context. The people tweeting are usually strangers.

~~~
majewsky
> Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control.

I've always thought of the "Unfollow" button serving that purpose.

~~~
richmarr
The trouble is that people are inconsistent and multi-faceted.

I might really really value a particular friend's opinion on tech, but
constantly roll my eyes and sigh when he live-tweets his hot takes on
Eurovision or football.

~~~
dagw
It would be cool if Twitter could do some sort of clever analysis on a persons
tweet history and when you start following someone say: "Dave often tweets
about US Politics, Baseball, Skiing and Programming. Which of these topics do
you want to follow".

------
shurcooL
My favorite part of Twitter is that it's like a global public email. If you
can find someone on it, it's likely you can reach out to them and have a brief
conversation in public.

Because the conversation is public rather than private, you can also find
existing relevant conversations that might answer your question. No need to
always be the one doing the talking.

It can either be someone famous, like John Carmack, Elon Musk, Markus Persson.
Or it can be someone obscure, say a person who made your favorite Chrome
extension or an indie video game from 2000.

Also, it feels like the place to go if you want to connect with people around
a real-time event. Imagine you think you felt an earthquake. You can quickly
see if others felt it too.

These are all awesome uses of Twitter that anyone can benefit from without
needing to have any followers.

They are also things I would miss if Twitter goes away, because I don't think
there's anything equivalent that has these properties (not counting Twitter
clones).

~~~
theinternetman
>These are all awesome uses of Twitter that anyone can benefit from without
needing to have any followers.

fyi accounts with low or no follower counts are now auto-blocked using the new
safety features by most important people so this is no longer true.

------
metheus
Twitter isn't growing because it is a _bad_ _product_. Everyone using it has
to train in a host of workarounds. Posting pictures of text to get around the
character limit. Tweetstorms to get around the character limit. ".@mention" to
get around the reply behavior preventing users from composing text naturally.
Lousy feed grooming. (I love <some tech> but I hate <some sport>. Too bad!
<some luminary in that tech> loves <that sport>!)

Twitter has some great aspects. It's really lightweight and doesn't enforce
mutuality, making it possible to _form_ communities on events on topics, or to
learn in realtime what's going on somewhere. But as a product it is complete
and utter garbage.

And twitter can't improve, because it's hardcore base is super convinced that
its critical flaws are _features_.

------
tommynicholas
This is the first "why the Dick Costolo move was the problem" take I've ever
read that made any sense to me. This is excellent.

(And it should go without saying that Dick did his job, as assigned,
unbelievably well. It just seems to me he was assigned the wrong job at the
wrong time and this makes sense of why in a way that makes sense to me
finally).

~~~
Devolver
+1000%. Dick did what he was brought in to do. The way it panned out is
another strong datapoint for the argument that consumer internet companies
should be led by product/visionary types while detail/implementation types run
the operation of the business.

Like Zuckerberg/Sandberg or Jobs/Cook or...

~~~
tommynicholas
I think Dick is actually a pretty good CEO and told a good story and had a
good vision for Twitter as a business. It was just a vision for "Twitter as it
exists right now" which is what a hired gun CEO is going to have a vision for.
I can imagine Dick being a great founder/CEO.

But yes - surrounding Jack (pre-Evan switch) with a STRONG #2 was the move.
When that didn't happen, can't blame them for not seeing it at the time!, Dick
was probably the best they could do. Still, it's sad. Evan's vision for
Twitter was correct and more obvious now than ever.

~~~
Devolver
Well said.

------
Animats
Twitter's problem is not failure to grow. It's failure to achieve
profitability. That's inexcusable for a company that pays nothing for content
and operates a relatively simple service. What on earth do they need 3500
employees for?

~~~
mrweasel
The focus for Twitter, its investors, and the press have always been on
growth, as if getting bigger would magically turn Twitter profitable. Sure
there's the economy of scale, but they already claim to have more than 300
million users.

Even with only a 100 million users it would seem that an 11 year old company
would have found its footing and started to make a profit, regardless of how
small. The people managing Twitter are thinking in those terms, nor are its
investors. They seem looked in a dotcom era mindset, where growth most come at
any cost. They aren't going to be content with Twitter being a niche product.

------
exolymph
The fundamental product with Twitter is that its product doesn't appeal to
_everyone_ [1] the way that Google and Facebook do. This may be the problem
with Snapchat as well, although that hasn't been conclusively determined. If
Twitter were a truly mass-market product, none of the rest of its problems
would matter. But it's not, and that's a conundrum, since you can't monetize a
social network through means other than advertising:
[https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-
business...](https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business-
models/)

[1] Yes, "everyone" is a slight exaggeration. If you exclusively use
DuckDuckGo and Gnu Social, you're the odd one out, I'm sorry to say.

~~~
bshimmin
This is it. Everything else is just a convoluted red herring.

For nearly everyone, Facebook is just better in every single way for the
things that they actually want something "social" to do - which seems (from
looking over people's shoulders, since I'm no longer a Facebook user) to be
having group chats in real-time, posting baby pictures, sharing and commenting
on crappy Buzzfeed material, and organising events. Twitter doesn't do any of
those very well. From a really simple perspective, Facebook already has a
mechanism for posting status updates, which is the main thing people
understand that Twitter does... and if everyone you know is already on
Facebook (which has been the case probably for almost the entirety of
Twitter's existence), why would you post your updates on Twitter?

------
norswap
Twitter's prime flaw is that it is fundamentally narcissistic in a way that,
say Facebook, isn't.

Of course you can be narcissistic on Facebook, but you can just add your
friends and react on their shit, and occasionally post a photo of your
weekend.

On Twitter, if you're not capital I interesting or flailing for attention,
you'll just get ignored. Hence the other comments that Twitter isn't social at
all.

Twitter is great if you like to sell yourself (and are at least mildly good at
it). Otherwise it's a stymied feed reader for random thoughts.

~~~
majewsky
> On Twitter, if you're not capital I interesting or flailing for attention,
> you'll just get ignored.

So? Twitter is as much a platform for consumption as it is for broadcasting.

Also, I find that statement to be pretty untrue. For example, my own account
only contains very few "original programming". Most of the time, I just scroll
through my timeline and push "retweet" on the most interesting stuff. That has
been enough to earn me nearly 150 followers.

~~~
massysett
How many of those followers are bots?

~~~
adrian1973
Indeed. In my own case, I haven't tweeted in years, but I have not lost any
followers (about 180-190, which is incredible considering I'm a non-famous
misanthrope) and last time I scanned my followers list they were almost all
friends or acquaintances who themselves have not tweeted in years, marketing
types who follow 1000000 people hoping for a follow back, and obvious bots.

------
sytelus
TLDR; the reason per article is that Twitter killed their developer APIs. This
in turn was caused by the event when board removed the visionary founder Ev
Williams and instead put in place a guy who saw Twitter as pure media company
and had a job to turn it in to ad revenue platform. This meant no other
properties can compete with Twitters own properties. Williams instead had
envisioned Twitter as massive real time data collection system which can be
monetized for insights which required welcoming all 3rd party apps it can. So
bottom line is re-occurring story of board ejecting founder and his/her long
term vision and replace with someone who is specialized in milking the product
for quick profits.

~~~
cookiecaper
Can you blame them for wanting to make money? In some sense they're victims of
the VC funding cycle. "Spend billions and figure out how to make money later"
has never been solid ground to build a company on, even if a couple of
unicorns have pulled it off.

Is there a way to get the adoption necessary as a bootstrapped product that
knows how it's going to make money from day one?

------
jessaustin
That's a bit overwrought, but it makes sense. Firing @ev was an act of fearful
stupidity. No matter how many fail whales flew, installing a square like
Costolo was a complete overreaction. We know this because as TFA observes he
killed the company in his first year, and still the zombie trudges on.
Whatever crazy shit @ev was going to do, it would have taken years to destroy
twitter, and might well have actually produced a business model. "Pulse of the
planet" was probably not in the cards, but it was conceivable.

Whatever might have happened, the obvious way to profits capable of reviving
the zombie we see now isn't actually that far from the "media company in ads"
model that TFA derides. Twitter is a broadcast platform. It is most valuable
to those broadcasters who reach and monetize a large audience. Charge them for
that audience without chasing the audience away, and now you have a business.

------
king_magic
For me, it's very simple: visually and UX-wise, Twitter is a toxic hellstew.
I'm no fan of Facebook (and I've since given up entirely on it), but at least
I can pretty much figure out what's going on in most of my friends' lives
today by scrolling down. With Twitter, I no longer scroll. I open it and give
up almost immediately. There's no coherent thread through anything, it's just
an unrelenting wash of unrelated complaints, marketing messages, ads, and
racist/sexist nightmare fuel.

Twitter (and Facebook, for that matter) is a net loss for humanity, IMO.

------
Yizahi
It's an old and predictable rant, but for me Twitter is useless and unusable.
140 char limit is artificial and doesn't serve a point except to mimic sms,
and interface is cluttered and horrible. Whenever I stumble across someones
twitter is is completely unclear who writes messages and who responds to whom.
All messages are littered with some visual garbage like tags that are for some
reason inside of messages. It is just a UI mess.

~~~
adamrezich
>140 char limit is artificial and doesn't serve a point except to mimic sms

...And to actively encourage witty, retweetable "hot takes" instead of in-
depth discussions on issues. If someone espouses a "political opinion" in a
140-character tweet, whether or not said opinion actually stands up to
scrutiny doesn't matter as long as it's emotionally resonant.

This is why Twitter has any value at all, to be honest. It's a highly
efficient means of propagating memes (actual sense of the word) from famous
people to non-famous people with short attention spans (nearly everyone). The
non-famous-people then spread the brief, succinct memes to their non-famous
friends, etc. etc.

------
TheRealDunkirk
All the discussions about Twitter's problems seem to lack the perspective of
what it feels like to use the service if you're not already a public figure.
For this purpose, a magazine author qualifies. Anyone with enough clout to be
taken seriously on the subject is already part of the problem.

Twitter's great at marketing, PR, and sales. It's also a fun way to make a
quip, if that's the only thing you do. However, it's pretty lousy as a means
to have a discussion. Anything over a full round trip exchange gets lost in
the noise so quickly as to be useless.

To the article's credit, it was no surprise for me to read that the current
CEO made it his top priority to make the platform interesting to advertisers.
Job well done, I say. He has succeeded spectacularly. But at what cost?

Unless you have thousands of followers you're invisible. This encourages
caustic hyperbole in order to illicit responses. Why is anyone surprised that
spam, negativity, and the friction of trying to communicate with actual
friends isn't interesting after the novelty wears off? I agree that they shot
themselves in the foot with killing the API, but I think that only sped up the
inevitable.

------
ysavir
> Facebook’s strategy of becoming an integral part of other company’s products
> was key to them becoming a utility. Twitter was on that same path prior to
> their limiting developer API access.

No, not really on the same path. If Facebook was strictly a status update
website, then the comparison would be proper. But Facebook's platform was rich
with content and varied features. That's what let its API system become such
an enhancement: Other sites would integrate Facebook into their own platform
for a feature or two, but people would return to Facebook proper because it
allowed them to see those features _among other features_. In the end,
regardless of their intent, websites consuming the Facebook API were
essentially being integrated into Facebook, and not the other way around.

Twitter, on the other hand, _is_ pretty much a status update website. And if
it kept its API open, it would have been a much different story than Facebook.
No one would have a reason to return to Twitter, they would simply continue to
visit the sites/apps that integrated the tweets. Whatever ads Twitter had
would score even less clicks than they do now. It would, perhaps, integrate
Twitter into the ecosystem more than at present, but I doubt it would open up
much opportunities for revenue.

All that is, of course, conjecture. Still, I have a hard time seeing the
Twitter API leading to something more.

------
Jaruzel
I'm a on/off twitter user -I go through bursts of using it, and then I ignore
it for months.

When there's a news event I'm interested in, I tend to search twitter for
keywords, or the relevant #hashtag - as a news consumption service, using it
in this manner works quite well. However as others have said, unless you are
in the 1% that have millions of followers, you are basically tweeting into a
vacuum; it's effectively an _anti_ -social network.

My main problem is how to organise it all. I don't have time to endlessly
scroll through a mixed bag of tweets in one stream - I tried tweetdeck, but my
preferred usage model would have resulted in 100s of columns, which isn't
right either.

Am I missing a feature here? i.e. is there a way to create filtered 'lists'
that I haven't found, or do I need a specialist client?

~~~
JamieF1
You can create a list of people and then view just their tweets. Twitter keeps
this fairly hidden away for whatever reason. So you could have a "News" list
or whatever. I think that's what you mean anyway.

~~~
Jaruzel
Thanks for that. I finally found the 'lists' option. However, compared to
Facebook it's a ballache to add users to lists. Also there's no filtering
option so retweets (something I dislike about twitter) can't be filtered out
:(

------
brian-armstrong
This article raises some interesting points but I think ultimately misses the
mark.

Twitter's problem is that it does and always has lacked discipline. It spends
an enormous amount of money on product and engineering and has almost no
velocity to show for it. If they could have reigned it in and taken a careful
approach from the get-go, things would have been very different for them.

2012 was way too late to actually right the ship. Costolo was chosen to try to
bring meagre profitability to the money fire. Whatever decisions they made at
that point were nearly immaterial. If instead Twitter had exercised careful
hiring and engineering discipline, it could have greatly cut costs, which
would have given it significantly more leverage and more options by the time
2012 came around.

~~~
sytelus
I don't think Twitters large engineering teams are just sitting around doing
nothing. The article is essentially saying that most of the Twitters resources
are being spent on making it an ad platform as opposed to making it "pulse of
the planet" system. So much of the Twitters engineering efforts is invisible
to outside world but probably very useful for ad buyers.

------
tracker1
When 3/4 of the "users" are bots, and you hit a point where your personal
firehose is too much to read in a day... you don't use it as much. They try to
be "smarter" but the fact is bots don't click on ads, and trying to promote
popular/sponsored crap is something we already get from Facebook, and frankly,
they're better at it.

It's pretty nice when you want to follow a handful of celebrities... when
you're in tech, for instance, you wind up with a few hundred people you're
interested in seeing stuff from, but it winds up too much, and then drowns out
any people you may know personally. Add to that the follow-spam crap that just
floods the experience, and there's not much that can be done imho.

------
Noos
Most of my experience on it was just endless hard to read lists of people
linking things that I already knew about, since I learned of their twitter
through their blog. Followers also made no sense since so many were either
bots or people using botlike tactics.

I think most of its goodwill was from being first in its niche, but as I grow
older, I notice that increasingly many of the older net is becoming less fun
to use. Netflix is just becoming a cable network when I loved it being a
rental place, Amazon is a place where you consume streaming stuff and less a
storefront you can trust, Facebook is a place to learn about the latest memes
your grandmother likes, etc.

I wonder if we won't start to see a lot more failures to grow in coming years,

------
jondubois
Dick Costolo's company FeedBurner (which was acquired by Google) seems to have
been pretty heavy on the API side (based on the Wikipedia article). So it's a
bit quick to label it as a media and advertising company and to portray
Costolo as not understanding the potential of APIs and developer ecosystems.

People love to point finger at individuals but maybe the real underlying
problem is that users just don't care about Twitter enough in a world where
Facebook exists. I never understood Twitter. It never made sense to me as a
normal person. It's a tool for celebrities, not for regular people - It's a
niche market - Niche is not compatible with free.

------
samdoidge
Displaying metrics has been a great move, but I'm not sure it can counter the
negative impact of recent censorship / banning of accounts.

1\. Keep metrics.

2\. Make as a platform for free speech, except when breaking laws.

3\. Open up API / limits.

------
hive_mind
Twitter doesn't work predictably. Period.

The mobile web app is a disaster. There are two back buttons (one in the
browser and one in the app), and if I click on a "retweet with comment" to go
into the original tweet, and then try either back button, it doesn't take me
back to the "retweet with comment".

"Hatching Twitter" claimed they smoke a lot of dope in the offices there. I'm
inclined to believe it.

Zuck was 100% apropos: it's a clown car that fell into a gold mine and now
doesn't know what to do with it.

------
meerita
I support the hyphotesis of having the worst and most horrible developer
support. When Twitter became popular there were dozens of apps, now you have
to rely on the official ones, very buggy. The integration with other apps is
not transparent, too many fights between Instagram and Twitter led the last
one to lose many opportunities and, features, Twitter lost the train with the
chance of photography and video, they did it great with Vine but I still don't
understand why they close it.

------
jakenotjacob
It's much more important to sustain than to grow.

A better metric would be 'longest active using user base', and sustanance of
it.

All things that grow can fall, it's endurance that's key.

------
mc32
"It did this despite the tremendous odds against any company that sets out to
change the world"

That's a pretty bold claim. I mean, everyone sets out to change things in some
way --I think this thought was an afterthought that formed later on, not at
genesis.

I also don't believe they are the only ones who can effect a kind of public
megaphone or rather police radio everyone could broadcast in or listen into.
There is an intersect of that, but for the most part it serves commercial
interests and that is the main reason anyone cares about "numbers". If it were
a public service, the press and all the activists and all the commercial
interests would not care about "lack of growth"

That said, some ideas about handling the negativity for end users would be to
enable a few features which would further frustrate growth but give users more
control:

Don't ban users but do classify them be it automatic classification or crowd-
classified. Allow users to allow comms from these classes or not.

So for example, if I only want to receive tweets from "clean" accounts, that's
all I can ever get. If I want more mature streams, allow those too, if I want
to allow "offensive" then allow those in too. Basically, I'm a fan of Flickr
and the control they give users and mods to moderate content. It's a pretty
useful approach, but it sort of undermines the "social network viral growth"
requirement.

That said, social has come, but it will go as people settle down on how to
interact with on-line social networks.

------
tyingq
They could maybe spiff up the interface for what it's currently used for a
lot...It's a defacto complaint box for a lot of brands.

I don't know the brand's side of that is as clunky as the complainers side.
But the complainers side is clunky. You can't tell if it's a company that will
respond, if they do, the average wait, if you have to follow prior to a DM,
what info they need, etc.

It sounds boring, but would lead to something they could upsell to the brands.

~~~
cookiecaper
Yeah, I've never really gotten this. Companies have this impulse to treat
social media pages as expedited call centers. That's bad for everyone; it's
annoying to have to air your problem publicly and deal with a social media
manager, and it reflects badly on brands to see complaint after complaint.
This behavior only could've emerged because they indulged it. I'm not sure
what PR training course advised doing this instead of sending a message that
support requests go through channel X and then deleting the
complaint/message/request.

~~~
tyingq
Job expansion/preservation from the social media people at the brand.

On Twitter's end, basically forcing brands to interact, since you can't delete
complaints (you can't can you?)

------
udfalkso
Interesting thesis.

It was a similar situation during the Terry Semel days at Yahoo! Too much
focus on becoming a media company and selling ads.

------
olivermarks
tl/dr Twitter shouldn't have fired Ev, who was trying to build a billion
peroson 'pulse of the planet' app and installed Costello, who wanted to turn
it into a media company.

God mode articles that start with the word 'why' are usually suspect, this one
is no exception

------
gwbas1c
Around 2010 I stopped using Twitter. It never really appealed much to me. Once
it came out that it was going to be a marketing tool, I saw no real reason to
use it. Why use something that's sole purpose is to put ads in front of me? I
see enough ads all the time.

------
dmitripopov
It's just there are better ways to discover and consume news than over-crowded
micro-blogging platform saturated with info-noise. It has it's number of
addicts already, much in the same way the number of weed-smokers does not grow
exponentially no more.

------
boubiyeah
Must everything grow to be considered worthy?

~~~
krallja
Twitter must grow, because it is unprofitable. It is alive only because they
have enough investor cash available to use as rocket thrusters to keep from
hitting the ground.

Grow, or SPLAT!

~~~
TallGuyShort
Twitter must _make money_ , because it is unprofitable. Adding more users or
even keeping existing users doesn't necessarily translate to that. They
probably need to more fundamentally rethink what they're doing rather than
just make more people willing to install the app.

------
Finnucane
Perhaps the question is not 'why is it failing to grow' but 'why should it
grow?' I ask this as someone who does not have a twitter account. What I see
of Twitter is filtered through second-hand sources. From where I sit, I
wonder, what value is using this going to add to my life? And the answer seems
to be, none. If they're going to grow, they need to prove a value proposition
to people who aren't already using it, and I think that's going to be hard.

------
lottin
The real reason: everybody that wants Twitter already has Twitter.

------
thex10
I've come across so many otherwise intelligent people who just reflexively go
"oh I don't _get_ Twitter at all". It reminds me of the people who are all "I
hate / don't understand / can't do math" without giving it a chance. What I'm
pondering here is maybe there's a mental hurdle here at play, in addition to
the UX issues cited in these other comments.

------
jack9
> They range from a lack of clear vision coming from the top

This.

> to the rampant, flagrant, unchecked abuse unleashed on prominent minorities,
> women, and ...

No, this is the audience. This is the open and free internet and trying to
blame it for business failures is part of the previous fault. Belief in this
as a fault, is the result of this gullible and simple minded audience affected
by a sensationalist media (who are only slightly more sophisticated).

------
yttrium
I'm surprised more commenters aren't noting the racism/sexism/anti-semitism
component. By far that's one of the worst parts of twitter - if you follow any
prominent women/minorities, you'll notice the kind of daily maintenance they
need to do just to be able to use the service properly.

------
trungonnews
No website wants to support Twitter login because Twitter refuses to share its
user's email address.

------
theprop
Not a very good article. Almost clickbait. There is no way Twitter would've
replaced Bloomberg (though the comparison is a good insight although
stretched). Monetizing Twitter is not what hurt twitter, Facebook is certainly
monetizing. Though moving out a product CEO for an Ad CEO could've hurt it.
It's unlikely getting rid of third-party clients hurt Twitter...not having
them never hurt Facebook. Twitter is certainly not a utility to most people
the way Facebook is, that's fair enough...maybe it is around being "the pulse
of planet" but in Twitter really is that as it's cited ridiculously often for
reactions and really the pulse of the globe...regardless a more product-
focused CEO could potentially transform Twitter into something more like a
utility service, but the author doesn't really tell us how or why or know what
that would be.

------
a3n
Because everyone who sees value in a twitter account already has a twitter
account?

~~~
gozur88
Pretty much. You can't grow double-digit percentages every year without
running out of customers at some point. At that point you'd better be making
money.

------
digi_owl
Thing to keep in mind about Twitter is that it started out as a SMS
"broadcast" service.

the web accessible log was virtually an afterthought that only in hindsight
became their main feature.

------
kylehotchkiss
Do they really need nearly 4,000 employees and san francisco office space?
those two variables could be tweaked for profitability.

------
btbuildem
So, too late to open up the API?

------
soufron
Because it's already big, but it's not a standard and it's proprietary?

------
worik
Perhaps Twitter is big enough? It grew to the propper size and there it can
stay...

------
asendra
I just keep waiting for Twitter to show some fucking adaptability.

------
sixQuarks
The guy that runs the blog has really good copy writing skills.

------
toufique
Twitter... SAD! :P

------
VLM
No one has suggested duration yet. Some activities have a fixed length of
life. Take for example CB radio which also peaked around 1/10th of all cars,
interesting how twitter similarly peaked around 1/10th of internet users.

Perhaps twitter is exactly like Fondue pots. Until it exists demand
accumulates for decades perhaps. It bursts on the scene and for awhile the
stockpiled demand results in exponential fad like growth until virtually all
weddings in the 70s received at least one fondue pot as a wedding gift.
Eventually the centuries of stockpiled demand for crusty bread and delicious
hot cheesy sauce subside to normal business as usual demand levels, in other
words use of fondue pots dropped from absolutely everyone because they were
the hot new gadget to perhaps less than 1%. Most of the demand for fondue went
into the nacho sector, arguably modern loaded nachos are a superior form of
cheez sauce delivery over fondue. Or perhaps the loaded baked potatoe is the
descendant of the 70s fondue. Or what little 2010s fondue exists today is the
descendant of 1970s fondue.

The point being that nothing existed like Fondue, I mean twitter, before, so
its going to burn the underbrush of society like a forest fire very brightly
for a short amount of time before declining back into normal obscurity much
like telephone modem BBSes of the 80s, perhaps.

I'd postulate that "Television" is a long term bubble. The viewership numbers
are horrible looks like newspapers. Everyone over 65 watches like 16 hours per
day and no one under 20 watches TV. My kids don't watch TV other than
streaming a couple series they learned about online or from friends. Its kind
of funny that when I was a little younger it was a holiness signalling fad to
declare my kids will not watch TV all day like me and my parents generation
and we're gonna not own a TV blah blah blah like most social signalling no one
did it or believed it but just enjoyed basking in the hype. However now that I
have kids, kids don't watch TV anymore once they get past babysitter era stuff
like animated PBS stuff. I can't get my kids to watch TV so I can get the
social status from claiming to cut them off, LOL.

Social media is dead now except for middle aged women sharing pix of cats if
they're left wing or kids if they're right wing. We live today in the era of
interruption where being interrupted by your phone and watch proves you're
important and well informed. The content interrupting you is unimportant, what
matters is being seen in public being very active online, constantly being
interrupted and posting stuff. VLM's law is all social media interaction
eventually devolves to Tamagotchi.

Twitter is more than a fad in that a fad has nothing to perpetuate it beyond
social signalling. But its less than a major change in society like "cars" or
"suburbs" or "industrialization".

------
zeofig
why does it need to grow?

it is big already

------
red023
I don't really like censored social networks in general but:

Anybody who thinks its our economy and mindset is sick? Why is something
deemed as "failing" when its not growing. Twitter has millions of people on
it. If its userbase stays exactly like it is I don't consider this "failing".

~~~
mrweasel
I think you're absolutely right. The impression you walk away with is that
Twitters problem is the lack of new users. While it certainly would be nice,
for Twitter, to have even more users, I would say that the main issue is their
inability to make money on their existing users.

The mindset is that growth will somehow fix the broken business model. Well if
that's true, then give us the number of users that will make Twitter
profitable. I mean would Twitter be better of with 500 million users, perhaps
a billion?

------
bike4beer
About two years ago, and +2,000 followers I deleted my twitter account. Why
pray tell?

Because they wanted my cell phone number, and my personal Identification, not
unlike paypal.

Twitter was anonymous, and now its not; I think its not growing just like
gmail.com, before when it was all anonymous many people were joining, now
going in people know they have no anonymity, thus many simply don't complete
the registration process once they know that twitter is collecting everything
about them, and knows exactly who there are, & where they are ( cell phone
tracking device ).

Game over for anonymity, and that marked the end of growth for social
networking.

About two years ago for twitter.

------
pinaceae
Twitter is a global chatroom for "journalists" and others interested in any
kind of global/regional/local event.

It is focused on moments, topics and the "discussions" around them. The UI
limits discussions, by design or accidental design. But it works, just hammers
everything down.

You want to witness news as they are being digested by the media and turned
into "real news"? Use Twitter.

There are only so many news junkies, but for those, nothing beats Twitter.

It is the breaking news ticker bar on the bottom of the TV, amplified - plus
the ability to yell at it.

I love it, and I hate it.

------
threeseed
Yet another "ads are bad, third party clients are good" post. Seen it at least
a dozen times and still yet to see any evidence of an alternate strategy that
has actually been thought through.

FourSquare made a data business work because location data is valuable from
the largest to the smallest business. Twitter data isn't and so the comparison
is tenuous at best. And Bloomberg, really ? The idea that Twitter could be an
alternative completely misreads the industry.

~~~
Devolver
Disruption (REAL disruption) happens when janky, poorly-featured products come
along and do one key, valuable thing much better than their established,
mature, full-featured competitors.

The janky upstart uses that small edge (and its much lower costs, price
points, or other efficincies) to get a foothold, then steadily builds out a
complete solution that is more compelling than the status quo...which then
finds itself disrupted.

With that context in mind, here's the opening line of Bloomberg's Terminal
Info page:

"The Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on every market,
unparalleled news and research, powerful analytics, communications tools and
world-class execution capabilities — in one fully integrated solution."

I'd like to draw your attention to that first two parts: "real time data on
every market, unparalleled news.."

To gather and process that data and unparalleled news, Bloomberg employs an
army of human news gatherers. The company is private, so I don't know their
financials, but I'd be willing to wager that its news gathering organization
is one of the top contributors to Bloomberg's COGS.

Meanwhile, how many trades (and how much $$$) in equities, currencies, and
commodities happen every day based on information about something that just
happened in the world?

How much of an advantage does having that information first confer to the
person who gets it?

Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one
billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and
leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data and
info that traders would love to pay for...that it could have beaten Bloomberg
at the "real time data and unparalleled news" game with a MUCH lower cost
structure?

And then...

~~~
_pmf_
> Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one
> billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and
> leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data
> and info that traders would love to pay for...

People are posting pictures of their food and calendar quotes; it's not that
Twitter cannot utilize the information ... there's just not much to work with
in the first place.

