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In the social media space, Twitter is a strange outlier. It's spent the better part of the entire time it's existed grappling with understanding where it fits against Facebook, Instagram, Snap and a host of competitors. At the same time, it's remained largely the same and growth has stagnated.
Yet again, the company has faced something of a reckoning in the last few weeks as it figures out what it wants to be in the long term. As drama unfolded with Infowars leading Apple, Facebook, Google and others to block Alex Jones from their services, Twitter dug in its heels and refused to do the same.
Days later, as the furor over the decision reached its peak, CEO Jack Dorsey told The Washington Post that he's "rethinking the core of how Twitter works" as a result, a platitude that the company has repeatedly uttered year after year without actually doing anything truly substantial.
On the very same week, Twitter began cutting off access to third-party developers like Tweetbot, a change which has long been signaled by the company as it attempts to get users to use its own apps instead.
Naturally, the majority of third-party Twitter app users are the earliest on the service, and happen to be the noisiest as well. Just two percent of users reportedly actively log in with a third-party app, but the outrage felt palpable as the shutdown happened.
For Twitter, the reality is that it's long struggled to move forward because of a reluctance to upset that loyal, loud, early user base. Third-party apps were great in the beginning for the service, and have quickly become a liability as Twitter struggled to monetize the service, then with rolling out valuable changes, like in-stream discovery, that made it more approachable.
Over the years, Twitter has spent massive amounts of effort on appeasing developers, often at the expense of the core platform, and it seems like those days are over: developers can't emulate the core app anymore. People are protesting the shift on #BreakingMyTwitter, but the ability to focus by doing this, in my opinion, is a good move for the service's health.
The question that's left today is whether or not Jack Dorsey is able to be decisive enough to actually initiate the changes he detailed. I've heard from friends at the company that new ideas are debated to death, simply because Dorsey is unwilling to come down on a side.
According to those friends, many great features have died this way, despite being close to shipping. Ideas are built, then debated to death, in the same way that the company has managed the platform in cases similar to Infowars, ultimately resulting in the feature stagnation we've seen to date.
It feels like this debate appears year in and out, and little changes, but just maybe this time it'll be different.
🌎 Jack Dorsey says he's rethinking how Twitter works [Washington Post]
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