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Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow

331 points by Devolver 9y ago

udfalkso 9y ago
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.
tommynicholas 9y ago
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 9y ago
  +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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Well said.
jessaustin 9y ago
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.
blizkreeg 9y ago
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.
- Devolver 9y ago
  Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it. However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.
  - blizkreeg 9y ago
    Real time state of the world is a nice platform for the ones who want to check the real time state of the world every day. Most of FB/Snap/Insta's B+ users just want to shoot the breeze with their posse.
    - 9y ago
threeseed 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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_ 9y ago
    > 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.
btbuildem 9y ago
So, too late to open up the API?
bike4beer 9y ago
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.
exolymph 9y ago
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-models/ https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business... [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 9y ago
  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?
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
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.
brian-armstrong 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
sytelus 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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?
trungonnews 9y ago
No website wants to support Twitter login because Twitter refuses to share its user's email address.
tyingq 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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?)
jakenotjacob 9y ago
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.
a3n 9y ago
Because everyone who sees value in a twitter account already has a twitter account?
- gozur88 9y ago
  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.
- rimliu 9y ago
  I have a twitter account even I do not see value in it. I don't even remember when was the last time I logged in. I've tried it, it did not work for me.
ramblenode 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
tracker1 9y ago
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.
mc32 9y ago
"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.
toufique 9y ago
Twitter... SAD! :P
olivermarks 9y ago
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
unlmtd 9y ago
The only way for software to grow is to have et available for everyone to do with it as they please.
Animats 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- VLM 9y ago
  Its going to take a lot of people to crack the ad supported service problem. Juno email in the 90s tried to provide free email to dialup users with ads, that failed. Ad supported cell phone service is stillborn and someone tries it every couple years. The fundamental problem is people who want status updates as a service see facebook as doing a better job and its paid for by selling your private stuff you don't care about and NSA access which is behind the scenes and "OK" but not in your face. Facebook could charge money and it would still crush twitter simply by not having as much spam. So if your company has no niche in the ecosystem and nobody wants to buy stuff, the short term solution is lots of employees and hope for a miracle. Hence 3500 people to basically run a web to IRC gateway that nobody wants because facebook and slack (and others) do it better. If there's no miracle the employee numbers will be 0 soon enough.
soufron 9y ago
Because it's already big, but it's not a standard and it's proprietary?
anovikov 9y ago
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%20Brand%20Performance%20BMW%20Blog%20II.jpg http://www.nada.com/b2b/Portals/0/assets/web-images/Luxury%2... 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.
- dovdovdov 9y ago
  No it can't, but it can be targeted by these negative articles indefinitely, so their stock might get to fall faster, and those who are shorting them can buy their new yacht sooner. ;)
  - reddytowns 9y ago
    The people shorting Twitter got together to buy a new yacht? Cool!
- mistermann 9y ago
  > and it does it well Well that's a matter of opinion! ;)
- nimchimpsky 9y ago
  I use it everyday, its great, it also has 2 billion revenue (?). I don't understand the hate for them.
  - mrweasel 9y ago
    I'm often rather hard on Twitter, but it's not the company as such that I hate. I hate that they are perceived as a valuable and successful Internet company, when they are clearly neither of those things. At this point Twitter should be the shinning example of the fact that users don't always translate into profit. At this point Twitter is, as the original comment states, a mature company, but they aren't behaving like one. There is very little reason that Twitter hasn't gone bankrupt. A 2 billion dollar revenue, no profit and no plan for the future. My best guess is that the people who invest in Twitter are all using it so heavily that they have become blind to the fact that it is a failing company/product.
meerita 9y ago
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.
Jaruzel 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 :(
norswap 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    How many of those followers are bots?
    - adrian1973 9y ago
      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.
  - norswap 9y ago
    > So? So it makes Twitter a frustrating experience for those that do not "just" want to consume content, and it's one of the reason that it is not growing.
shurcooL 9y ago
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 9y ago
  >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.
lottin 9y ago
The real reason: everybody that wants Twitter already has Twitter.
sixQuarks 9y ago
The guy that runs the blog has really good copy writing skills.
chjohasbrouck 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control. I've always thought of the "Unfollow" button serving that purpose.
  - richmarr 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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".
    - jononor 9y ago
      Multi-faceted is the thing Twitter and other person-based share/follow don't work well with. I ended up creating another account for music/art, separating it from my tech/business activity. But its pretty tedious to manage...
asendra 9y ago
I just keep waiting for Twitter to show some fucking adaptability.
Yizahi 9y ago
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.
- cx1000 9y ago
  > Is is completely unclear who writes messages and who responds to whom Agreed. I always thought I was just dumb or something, since how could such a massive company with hundreds of millions of users have a completely nonsensical ui? It must be intentional on their part, but to me the user experience seems capricious.
- adamrezich 9y ago
  >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.
dmitripopov 9y ago
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.
theprop 9y ago
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.
samdoidge 9y ago
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.
jondubois 9y ago
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.
red023 9y ago
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".
- dinglebert1234 9y ago
  Businesses, like organisms, must grow or die. That's how it works. That's why socialism and communism always fail.
  - Neliquat 9y ago
    Grow AND Die. If it lives, it must die. Only then can we move forward to the next iteration.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  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?
- passivepinetree 9y ago
  I agree with you, but the fact that they lost $500 million last year means that they have to do something. IMHO they should focus on trimming the fat and try to get to a sustainable, long term business model. This neverending focus on growth isn't healthy at all.
- red023 9y ago
  I think your nature analogy is flawed. Adults grow on intellect but not on body size, and if only in a bad way because they get fat. So no you don't die if you stop growing. Its our money and banking system with money created out of dept and dept must be payed that does not exist. While the banks print money out of thin air. This system is very unnatural and this is exactly what causes our economy to constantly need to grow, produce more next year, get more users ... to essentially pay off the ever growing dept.
boubiyeah 9y ago
Must everything grow to be considered worthy?
- krallja 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
king_magic 9y ago
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.
yttrium 9y ago
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.
gwbas1c 9y ago
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.
ysavir 9y ago
> 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.
VLM 9y ago
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".
digi_owl 9y ago
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.
Finnucane 9y ago
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.
zeofig 9y ago
why does it need to grow? it is big already
metheus 9y ago
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.
Noos 9y ago
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,
thex10 9y ago
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.
Winblows69 9y ago
I created a new Twitter account today. After having to uncheck roughly 20 separate e-mail notification settings and delete several "You should follow Ellen!" messages, I tried to add a profile picture. Much like previous years using Twitter, I received the ridiculous "there was a problem uploading your photo" error after spending 3 minutes cropping and aligning my picture. Presuming I waste another 3 minutes and it works, what am I left with? A blank profile with no followers and no clear way to socialize. Twitter's good for following and reaching out to public figures, but it's relatively pointless if you don't already have an audience.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pinaceae 9y ago
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.
kylehotchkiss 9y ago
Do they really need nearly 4,000 employees and san francisco office space? those two variables could be tweaked for profitability.
hive_mind 9y ago
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.
worik 9y ago
Perhaps Twitter is big enough? It grew to the propper size and there it can stay...
jack9 9y ago
> 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).

331 points by Devolver 9y ago

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.

tommynicholas 9y ago

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 9y ago
+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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Well said.

jessaustin 9y ago

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.

blizkreeg 9y ago

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.

Devolver 9y ago
Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it. However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.
- blizkreeg 9y ago
  Real time state of the world is a nice platform for the ones who want to check the real time state of the world every day. Most of FB/Snap/Insta's B+ users just want to shoot the breeze with their posse.
  - 9y ago

threeseed 9y ago

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 9y ago
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_ 9y ago
  > 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.

btbuildem 9y ago

So, too late to open up the API?

bike4beer 9y ago

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.

exolymph 9y ago

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-models/ https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business... [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 9y ago
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?

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago

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.

brian-armstrong 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

sytelus 9y ago

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 9y ago
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?

trungonnews 9y ago

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

tyingq 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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?)

jakenotjacob 9y ago

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.

a3n 9y ago

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

gozur88 9y ago
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.
rimliu 9y ago
I have a twitter account even I do not see value in it. I don't even remember when was the last time I logged in. I've tried it, it did not work for me.

ramblenode 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

tracker1 9y ago

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.

mc32 9y ago

"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.

toufique 9y ago

Twitter... SAD! :P

olivermarks 9y ago

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

unlmtd 9y ago

The only way for software to grow is to have et available for everyone to do with it as they please.

Animats 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
VLM 9y ago
Its going to take a lot of people to crack the ad supported service problem. Juno email in the 90s tried to provide free email to dialup users with ads, that failed. Ad supported cell phone service is stillborn and someone tries it every couple years. The fundamental problem is people who want status updates as a service see facebook as doing a better job and its paid for by selling your private stuff you don't care about and NSA access which is behind the scenes and "OK" but not in your face. Facebook could charge money and it would still crush twitter simply by not having as much spam. So if your company has no niche in the ecosystem and nobody wants to buy stuff, the short term solution is lots of employees and hope for a miracle. Hence 3500 people to basically run a web to IRC gateway that nobody wants because facebook and slack (and others) do it better. If there's no miracle the employee numbers will be 0 soon enough.

soufron 9y ago

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

anovikov 9y ago

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

dovdovdov 9y ago
No it can't, but it can be targeted by these negative articles indefinitely, so their stock might get to fall faster, and those who are shorting them can buy their new yacht sooner. ;)
- reddytowns 9y ago
  The people shorting Twitter got together to buy a new yacht? Cool!
mistermann 9y ago
> and it does it well Well that's a matter of opinion! ;)
nimchimpsky 9y ago
I use it everyday, its great, it also has 2 billion revenue (?). I don't understand the hate for them.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  I'm often rather hard on Twitter, but it's not the company as such that I hate. I hate that they are perceived as a valuable and successful Internet company, when they are clearly neither of those things. At this point Twitter should be the shinning example of the fact that users don't always translate into profit. At this point Twitter is, as the original comment states, a mature company, but they aren't behaving like one. There is very little reason that Twitter hasn't gone bankrupt. A 2 billion dollar revenue, no profit and no plan for the future. My best guess is that the people who invest in Twitter are all using it so heavily that they have become blind to the fact that it is a failing company/product.

meerita 9y ago

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.

Jaruzel 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 :(

norswap 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  How many of those followers are bots?
  - adrian1973 9y ago
    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.
- norswap 9y ago
  > So? So it makes Twitter a frustrating experience for those that do not "just" want to consume content, and it's one of the reason that it is not growing.

shurcooL 9y ago

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 9y ago
>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.

lottin 9y ago

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

sixQuarks 9y ago

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

chjohasbrouck 9y ago

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 9y ago
> Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control. I've always thought of the "Unfollow" button serving that purpose.
- richmarr 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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".
  - jononor 9y ago
    Multi-faceted is the thing Twitter and other person-based share/follow don't work well with. I ended up creating another account for music/art, separating it from my tech/business activity. But its pretty tedious to manage...

asendra 9y ago

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

Yizahi 9y ago

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.

cx1000 9y ago
> Is is completely unclear who writes messages and who responds to whom Agreed. I always thought I was just dumb or something, since how could such a massive company with hundreds of millions of users have a completely nonsensical ui? It must be intentional on their part, but to me the user experience seems capricious.
adamrezich 9y ago
>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.

dmitripopov 9y ago

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.

theprop 9y ago

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.

samdoidge 9y ago

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.

jondubois 9y ago

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.

red023 9y ago

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".

dinglebert1234 9y ago
Businesses, like organisms, must grow or die. That's how it works. That's why socialism and communism always fail.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  Grow AND Die. If it lives, it must die. Only then can we move forward to the next iteration.
mrweasel 9y ago
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?
passivepinetree 9y ago
I agree with you, but the fact that they lost $500 million last year means that they have to do something. IMHO they should focus on trimming the fat and try to get to a sustainable, long term business model. This neverending focus on growth isn't healthy at all.
red023 9y ago
I think your nature analogy is flawed. Adults grow on intellect but not on body size, and if only in a bad way because they get fat. So no you don't die if you stop growing. Its our money and banking system with money created out of dept and dept must be payed that does not exist. While the banks print money out of thin air. This system is very unnatural and this is exactly what causes our economy to constantly need to grow, produce more next year, get more users ... to essentially pay off the ever growing dept.

boubiyeah 9y ago

Must everything grow to be considered worthy?

krallja 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

king_magic 9y ago

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.

yttrium 9y ago

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.

gwbas1c 9y ago

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.

ysavir 9y ago

> 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.

VLM 9y ago

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".

digi_owl 9y ago

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.

Finnucane 9y ago

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.

zeofig 9y ago

why does it need to grow? it is big already

metheus 9y ago

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.

Noos 9y ago

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,

thex10 9y ago

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.

Winblows69 9y ago

I created a new Twitter account today. After having to uncheck roughly 20 separate e-mail notification settings and delete several "You should follow Ellen!" messages, I tried to add a profile picture. Much like previous years using Twitter, I received the ridiculous "there was a problem uploading your photo" error after spending 3 minutes cropping and aligning my picture. Presuming I waste another 3 minutes and it works, what am I left with? A blank profile with no followers and no clear way to socialize. Twitter's good for following and reaching out to public figures, but it's relatively pointless if you don't already have an audience.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pinaceae 9y ago

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.

kylehotchkiss 9y ago

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

hive_mind 9y ago

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.

worik 9y ago

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

jack9 9y ago

> 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).