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It's possible to over think things. Twitter exists to make money. They clearly thought this change would cost them nothing, and would perhaps save them money and effort. I don't think the "Twitter is a ..." thing has any relevance to the decision making process. I can think of very few things, related to the Internet, that haven't turned - or are not on the process of turning to - shit. No matter how cool anything starts out being, eventually the original developers sell it on or come up with stupid ideas and it gets ruined. It's like some inescapable physical property.

> Twitter exists to make money.

True, but for a platform business there has to be a correct recognition of the relevant time horizon. Amazon's profitability numbers in its first decade illustrate this.

Surely the lesson from Amazon is that you can get by for a long time without making loads of money, as long as you don't make stupid decisions, and get rid of the consequences of stuff that didn't work out before it hurts you.

Twitter makes decisions that people on the internet grumble about and make blog posts about and yes, even post on twitter about, but they still keep using twitter, which is all twitter cares about.

I think this oversimplifies things. If Twitter was making money we would not see such turmoil in the team or so much floundering about revenue generation tactics.

Yes - Twitter exists to make money.

But they need to decide how they want to make their money and grow in parallel. Is it ads? Celebrities accounts? Is it selling API access?

If I'm Twitter CEO I would stick with "developer friendly" approach in order to re-start Twitter growth.

In short, my opinion is that companies needs to be nice with developers and cherish them all the way until the company is very very successful. I guess Twitter executives think that they made it and "developer friendly" stage is behind them.

I would say that even if the developer-friendly stage was behind them (and given how rapidly the web evolves, I don't think that any social-media company should ever consider itself past that stage), the fair thing to do - in my eyes - is to at the very least show some gratitude for the people who helped you get where you are today.

Twitter and Facebook may be Big Corp today, but that wasn't always the case, and a lot of the initial growth that helped them get into the mainstream was due to hobbyists and independent devs that made cool little apps like EmojiTracker that would catch the attention of early adopters that then became the initial users of the platform.

The sad thing is that while Facebook became the generic one-size-fits-all "mom and dad" network (I can't even remember the last time I even used one of their 'apps' or whatever), Twitter really had the potential to evolve into something beyond that, if only it cultivated better relationships with their devs and encouraged people to build on and experiment with the platform.

Oh well. Lets keep an eye out for the next thing, I suppose!

If twitter exists to make money, then why aren't they operating a franchise network of fast-food restaurants, since that more obviously makes money than an sms-length syndication service. Also, shouldn't they be selling music streaming? Why aren't they in most markets at all? Do most markets have a marginal revenue of zero or negative?

Because Twitter doesn't "exist to make money" it also "exists to be Twitter." I'd prefer to never again hear that something "exists to make money", which is quite facile.

EDIT: there's a bit of a war between downvoters and upvoters on this comment. Let me break it down for you. The only way to agree that "twitter exists to make money" is by agreeing that the mission statement of every company on Earth should be, "Make money." Not much of a mission statement is it?

The first mission of every organization is not making money, it is living longer.

Maybe you think that should be the first mission of every organization, but it clearly isn't. After all, if you gave me $2M and I was supposed to use it to set up an organization that survives for as long as possible, it is likely that I could easily set up a legal entity in the United States that has a recognizable successor 300 years later (and no expenses or employees). If administrative costs are as high as $5K per year, with zero interest, that is still 400 years. But lots of organizations have more than $2M as some point, but at a later point just a couple of years later go bankrupt and simply disappear. Clearly it is not the first mission of every organization to live longer.

> It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about).

I fully agree with you, except on this point. With all the shitstorming, the mis-attribution of quotes, massive and massive amounts of fake accounts etc. going on, the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing especially as it does not force you to publically post your real name.

However, it could be expanded for greater reach.

I totally see your point. My counter-argument would be:

If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person.

By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects, Twitter has created an incentive for fake account creation. Its own ad-sales model benefits from this too, since many of the platform's top line numbers include fraudulent engagement data.

Also, Twitter has not made data/tooling available for third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis, so companies are paying for social media engagement numbers that include bots, sock puppets, etc.

But my larger point is that as a network Twitter should not care about spam and should instead let others determine what content is "good" vs "bad" for their particular use case.

> If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person.

I think these sentences contradict each other? Or maybe I'm misreading something.

Anyway, last December, after the release of The Force Awakens, someone created the account @AdamDriver2015 which was so convincing that even @VeryLonelyLuke quote-tweeted them. They were suspended after a few days, and one Twitter user claims it's because the owner of that account was creeping on other Twitter users under the guise of being the actor.

https://twitter.com/jennanamika/status/684176364438601728

It's very easy to make a fake account seem like a real person.

> By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects

Do you count "retweets" here? That's a large part of the problem, and it seems hard to change that without fundamentally changing what Twitter is.

> third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis

... hm, are you focusing on the aggregate affect of fraudulent accounts? It seems to me like that's a different problem from individual fraudulent accounts, and that verified accounts are legitimately good at the latter and aren't intended to deal with the former. In particular, all the bot checks are irrelevant for an individual fraudulent account, since there is a real human behind the account, just the wrong human.

> I think these sentences contradict each other?

The first statement is conditional on Twitter behaving like a neutral platform, which it does not. The second is meant to indicate that there is a cost associated with creating fake accounts, which is a factor in the economics of the system.

> It's very easy to make a fake account seem like a real person.

Why is this a bad thing? If casual Twitter users find the content entertaining, the fake account benefits the ecosystem.

> Do you count "retweets" here?

Yes. No need to ban retweets, just to show stats that indicate which are likely from retweet networks.

> ... hm, are you focusing on the aggregate affect of fraudulent accounts?

Yes because that is what drives the money flows. People create fraudulent accounts of both kinds to generate revenue. Someone somewhere is paying for the campaign that included thousands of fake retweets, etc. I saw a network graph recently that showed that such networks are easily identifiable with simple network analysis.

I don't think @AdamDriver2015 was created to drive money flows.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they had zero fake retweets. Just have a plausible-sounding name (done) and no competing account that's actually by the person in question (done), and reply to some relevant tweets from high-profile accounts, so you show up in the single-tweet view. At that point, some fraction of real humans will find out about the account and retweet you. No analysis will differentiate this from real humans, because everyone involved is a real human.

It seems difficult to argue that @AdamDriver2015 benefitted the ecosystem. Those who found the content entertaining did so because they thought it was genuine. Especially if it's true that the person behind the account was creeping on people in DMs, this seems like a very indefensible claim—but even if not, it's not advantageous to the ecosystem, unless Twitter is actively participating in making people believe the fake content is genuine.

I have worked closely with the management teams of some large celebrities. Almost all of them get anywhere from a handful to dozens of fake accounts created EVERY DAY, mostly by trolls and people who want to harrass others. Some of them are very convincing and "leak" false information, bully young fans who believe they are real, and so on. A small handful of them try to monetize by posting spam links, but it's really rare. The vast majority are just trying to get attention or have fun at someone else's expense. This may seem like a non-issue, but when you're a high-profile person trying to protect a reputation, it's a real headache. And when you're a fan thinking you're interacting with a celebrity, and they turn out to be a fake, it greatly reduces your trust in the platform.

Now, we could argue that we shouldn't really care about the concerns of celebrities, and that fan/celebrity interactions aren't what Twitter is for. But it's clear that they drive a lot of the traffic there, and Twitter encourages it. The verification system is one tool for making this experience better.

>the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing

When the program is used to delegitimize public figures who dissent from the left wing hegemony on the site[0], then it has lost all legitimacy. Verifying accounts now implies tacit approval of their message, which is not something Twitter should enter into lightly.

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-unveri...

Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down... in order to do this, it needs to make money somehow... they've chosen a two pronged approach to this. Someone/somewhere has to pay for it, and the end users simply won't do it...

1. Promoted tweeks - frankly, I find this kind of annoying, but I do understand.

2. Limiting high bandwidth streams to paid/commercial accounts, I'm not sure what they offer for NPOs, but I'd be surprised if they weren't lenient in their pricing structure.

Frankly, I understand it... At this point they aren't even breaking even iirc, so they need to make cuts to some deep cost centers that aren't facing end users.

TBH, I think they should also put methods in place of detecting bot networks, and freezing out those accounts.

> Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down

I realize that, I'm just not sure the investors have the right long-term view about the value Twitter offers.

If the value it offers to others can't be recouped then its meaningless in terms of investment.

Twitter, as it stands, is very useful to people in the media who use it as a free sentiment analysis and polling service during election cycles, and a free firehouse for unqualified reports that they can follow up on. However, Twitter doesn't receive remuneration on any of this value.

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became.

I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine).

I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible?

You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

Twitter should be a dumb pipe.

Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users.

[1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.

>You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757

Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off.

While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it.

Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data.

So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else.

Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section.

That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.

Infrastructure is a bad word to Wall Street, it implies it's no longer a growth stock. Wall Street will burn TWTR to the ground if it doesn't keep growing because no one on Wall Street cares about value, they want consistent quarter-over-quarter growth. This makes public companies like Twitter flail about wildly trying to find anything to keep their stock price from sinking even if it's outside their wheelhouse and wildly distorts their services/products.