Twitter's struggle to do anything at all

We've discussed Twitter's endless saga of doing essentially nothing here before, but a report from the Wall Street Journal finally gives weight to the real problems the company faces:

In policing content on the site and punishing bad actors, Twitter relies primarily on its users to report abuses and has a consistent set of policies so that decisions aren’t made by just one person, its executives say. Yet, in some cases, Mr. Dorsey has weighed in on content decisions at the last minute or after they were made, sometimes resulting in changes and frustrating other executives and employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

When you're a company as large as Twitter (last report said 3,372 full-time employees), with a part-time CEO, they shouldn't be involved in the minutia of managing the product itself. 

Yet it seems, Jack often shows up last minute to change course, or delay a decision:

Employees say Mr. Dorsey’s philosophical, arm’s-length leadership style has at times complicated decision-making. [...] He generally delegates to his subordinates, but at times projects stall because either no one knows what he thinks or he doesn’t pull the trigger, according to people familiar with the matter. For example, Twitter took almost two years to decide how to expand beyond its 140-character limit for tweets, a delay many employees attribute to Mr. Dorsey’s indecision.

There are numerous examples of this since Jack took the helm again at the company, and sources have told me of countless large features that were killed either in the ideation phase, or even as late as final testing, by Jack personally.

I genuinely don't know what to think of Twitter anymore, because it's the same story, stuck on repeat. Year after year, it promises big things, and fails to deliver many meaningful improvements, while still managing to piss off developers somehow in the process.

A bigger question is: would the company be better off with an external, non-founder CEO? My guess is yes, just because they might not be scared of doing something that upsets the user base.


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