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Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side, it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken groups (investors, founders,

Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side, it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken groups (investors, founders, politicians, journalists, activists, etc) and a terrible product-market fit with everyone else. I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics. News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y". I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.

kleinsch 5y ago
Yea, TikTok is playing in a similar place (big creators, lots of passive people) but their algo + video being stickier has led to massive wins. I think it’s late for Twitter, but interesting thought exercise on what could have been if they had the TikTok discovery algo.
martinald 5y ago
Me and my peer group seem to be using Twitter more than anything these days (early 30s) - but not how you'd think. We seem to all browse it to find interesting news/articles and then share them on WhatsApp groups. Having said that we all follow politics pretty closely so maybe we are a bit niche? I actually get a lot of value out of twitter. Way more than I used to do with Facebook, which is just total trash now and my habit of checking it all the time has actually stopped simply because the content was so poor I seem to have inadvertently trained my brain out of expecting a dopamine hit scrolling through it.

kleinsch 5y ago

Yea, TikTok is playing in a similar place (big creators, lots of passive people) but their algo + video being stickier has led to massive wins. I think it’s late for Twitter, but interesting thought exercise on what could have been if they had the TikTok discovery algo.

martinald 5y ago

Me and my peer group seem to be using Twitter more than anything these days (early 30s) - but not how you'd think. We seem to all browse it to find interesting news/articles and then share them on WhatsApp groups. Having said that we all follow politics pretty closely so maybe we are a bit niche? I actually get a lot of value out of twitter. Way more than I used to do with Facebook, which is just total trash now and my habit of checking it all the time has actually stopped simply because the content was so poor I seem to have inadvertently trained my brain out of expecting a dopamine hit scrolling through it.