The (Not So) Secret Reason Twitter Keeps Screwing Up

It was a limitation which seemed to actually work. People were happy with it, and anyone who wanted to tweet longer thoughts still could, either by posting a link to something written offsite, putting up a screenshot of a paragraph, or simply threading together a series of tweets. People still hated that, but that's fine. Again, internet gotta internet.

But then, with essentially no one asking for it, Twitter experimented with expanding tweets to 280 characters, and people immediately hated it. This might seem like a small thing if you're not a Twitter user, and I myself am hardly getting diaper rash over it. We'll almost certainly get used to it. But it sure doesn't feel like an improvement at the moment. I find myself not finishing tweets now -- which, yes, is a condemnation of my own bird-like attention span as much as anything else, but it's also not a good sign. Twitter's tinkering with their secret sauce here for no apparent reason.

So why'd you do that, Twitter? Did anyone ask you to do that? Or did essentially everyone ask you to do the exact opposite? Are you ... are you not reading all our tweets? That hurts, Twitter.

Initially, the only real tool to deal with harassers was to block them. This sounds like it should be feasible, but it has to be done one at a time, which is close to useless when it comes to blocking brigades of harassers, or anyone willing to create multiple accounts. More advanced blocking tools, which enable users to filter out notifications from new users, took years to arrive. And Twitter's reporting tool remains notoriously unhelpful. Reporting a clearly harassing tweet or account often results in nothing happening at all, the reports rejected with no explanation given.

It's this issue, more than anything else, which Twitter users have been begging the company to fix for several years now. That Twitter only evidently began taking it seriously in 2017 is baffling, and to the people who have endured years of abuse, probably a little insulting.

One of the key threads running through all these missteps seems to be Twitter's lack of understanding of what its users actually want or use the platform for. They keep adding features which no one is asking for, or ignoring features people desperately need, or tolerating Nazis a little more than is strictly necessary. Can it be so blind about the needs and appeal of its own product? They must have analytics telling them all this, and even if they didn't, they only need to find someone with an pregnant Mario avatar and 20,000 followers to fill them in on what they're missing.

Well, there is a reason behind almost all of these missteps, which is kind of an open secret to anyone who follows Twitter as a business, but is never stated plainly to the users.

Or it might be an issue of pressure from ownership. Maybe Twitter could be profitable now by selling premium accounts or becoming even remotely competent at advertising. But Twitter has been getting a bunch of money from investors essentially on the assumption that it would grow into something around the size of Facebook. And it's not the size of Facebook. It's really far from that size, actually, and its stock price has dropped accordingly. But still not that much, and those investors don't want to give up on the promise of Facebook-sized stacks of cash. "Grow!" the men in French-cuffed shirts shout, and so Twitter must grow. This isn't speculation -- growth is the first and most important item they mention in every shareholder letter and quarterly report.

And Twitter is growing. Just slowly. The problem is that Twitter's core experience just doesn't seem to appeal to huge swathes of the population the way Facebook or anilingus does. It's great for jokes, keeping up with the news, jokes about the news, and Game Of Thrones spoilers, and is consequently more or less a mandatory tool for any media type in the world. But the Twitter experience requires a bit of a buy-in; it's completely useless without your own account, and you kind of have to stick with it for a bit and get your list of followers and timeline set up to really make it fun. That's evidently a big barrier for many people.

So how is Twitter getting around that? How is it trying to grow? Blind flailing, apparently. Tinkering around the edges of their product in the desperate hope that makes it more appealing to new users. Who cares about mildly annoying your existing users (who still aren't paying for anything) if it results in a product more appealing to new users? A new homepage, which actual users never see? Why not? Fire some blue lines in the timeline, see what happens. More Moments tabs. Seven of them! And all the anti-harassment measures Twitter's been conspicuously dragging their feet on? Almost all of those would result in an environment which makes it easier for famous, well-known people to wall themselves off from newer, smaller accounts. That's predictable, and probably necessary, but the possibility of interacting with a famous person is one of Twitter's selling points to new users. Shutting that down will slow growth, so you can guess why they've been so reluctant to do that.

Which means that until Twitter gives up on the possibility of being a gigantic success and just settles for being a regular success, a couple times a year, we're going to see this little ritual of users bawling about blue lines or too many characters. Or it will run out of money and fold, and investors will have spent billions of dollars on the world's most expensive joke website. Which is actually pretty funny. Yeah, they should definitely do that instead.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and your best friend. As the author of the amazing novels Freeze/Thaw and Severance, he thinks you should definitely go buy both of those now. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

For more check out 7 Celebrities Who Are Hilariously Awful At Twitter and 6 Celebrities Who Are Surprisingly Angry On Twitter.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out If The Internet Was a High School, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow our new Pictofacts Facebook page. You won't regret it.