Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow

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.

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.

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

http://www.nada.com/b2b/Portals/0/assets/web-images/Luxury%2...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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?

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...

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Must everything grow to be considered worthy?

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.

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

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.

> 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).

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

So, too late to open up the API?

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

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

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

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

Twitter... SAD! :P

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".

why does it need to grow?

it is big already

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".

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.

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.

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.