The only way I can understand the argument is that their early UX / technical design influenced the community and culture that we now see. From the start, it se

The only way I can understand the argument is that their early UX / technical design influenced the community and culture that we now see. From the start, it seems like Twitter was designed for hottakes and emotional broadcasting, and countless little design decisions emphasized this (everything from the original 140 character limit to the UX around retweeting and followers.) The modern platform’s culture grew out of these early decisions and now embodies them in many ways, so much so that it’s difficult now to imagine that twitter could ever have been anything different. But what if following had only been bi-directional for example? What if the platform never displayed retweet or star count? What if muting and blocking had been built in from the start? What if you could only @mention people who follow you? It’s very possible that twitter would never have become Twitter if these things had been different, but that’s also my point. So while it may not be a technical root cause in the classic coding sense, I can buy the argument that many of twitter’s early technical and design decisions (as well as their early platform policies and who the first adopters were) led to their present difficulties