I don't agree with everything that the twitter leadership does but I'd be shocked if there were simple actions they're deciding not to take that would dramatically increase the quality of the site.
A privately owned twitter will behave very different from a public one.
Great example is that the bot problem contributes to MAU's, which impact Twitter's quarterly earnings. This means that they *can* solve the bot problem, but don't want to solve it right away lest it impact their metrics.
So ultimately the decision to take the company private will help execs stop focusing on short-term earnings and focus on long term values
> the bot problem contributes to MAU's, which impact Twitter's quarterly earnings.
For instance - I don't think MAUs "impact" Twitter's quarterly earnings - it is a stat that contextualizes their quarterly earnings for the market. So they have an incentive to not solve the bot problem if not solving it makes the site seem more popular - but that is very different from "being able to solve it."
Like, I just think that problems at scale are hard. There are bots that seem, to me, to be hurting Twitter's apparent position as a public company and it seems like, if they could fix those bots, they would.
Here is a real world example: A technology company I was at was acquired by Cisco Systems. During onboarding Cisco said that usernames on e-mail addresses couldn't be longer than 8 characters. Someone raised their hand and said "What do you mean? E-mail addresses can be longer than 8 chars. Cisco responded well that may be true technically, it isn't possible at Cisco"
Allowing 20 char e-mail addresses is a very simple action, but that organization couldn't do it.
If you're the CTO of Cisco, what do you do there? Do you risk your job and the continued existence of the company, spending God knows how many developer hours refactoring your codebase? Or do you just deal with 8-character email addresses?
The Climate change situation would be better off if we didn't have Tesla disrupting the status quo on EVs?
Rural and Emergency responders and the Ukrainian civilians would be better off if Starlink didn't exist?
The idea that a problem "looks easy to solve" and therefor the problem is that the people in charge are dumb is a childish way of looking at the world. All of large companies I've worked in / with have dumb restrictions. Everyone knows they are dumb. In my experience they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong but it's true that implementing "obvious" fixes is much, much harder than you might imagine.
I know it isn't a simple as editing a config file that has "MAX_CHARS=8". It is going to break some peoples' spreadsheets and processes, but the world will not end, and the company will not go bankrupt because of that change.