It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general. Google and Facebook

It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general. Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter. Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact. Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package. The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures). ______ Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man. Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope. Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut. There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find) _______ Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all. I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics. It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through. It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like