Remember Tom?

A few months ago an article popped up on the Washington Post about plans that Twitter had to experiment with how tweets were fed to people through their timelines on Twitter.  The motivation of such plans was to attempt to reduce online echo chambers and expose users to a greater variety of view points.

Whenever you see a product advertised, you generally expect it to do what it said it would do in the advertisement.  If it doesn't, not only would you feel disappointment but you would also be able to sue the advertiser for false advertisement.  There are regulations that govern what you can and cannot claim in an advertisement.  In its most basic terms the advertisement has to be realistic about what you can expect and can only stretch the truth so far.

Twitter is a product which you consume, and which you do actually pay for.  You don't fork out money for the service but you pay for the service through the data you give it, and the monetization that Twitter and others generate based on your activity on the platform.  In order to convince you to use the service, it tells you what it does and what to expect from it.  Twitter is a social network, and efficacy of its use aside, it is intended at least to be a place where you can be social and network with other people.  In doing so you connect with people who share your interests, who you have things in common with, or who you elect to follow in order to consume what they contribute.

The whole point of a timeline, and the ability to follow people on Twitter is to be able to cater the content you see based on your interests.  This is the same reason why YouTube has a subscription feature for you to follow channels and see the content they upload.  However, that functionality which is fundamental to the functioning of the entire site is being increasingly manipulated.  YouTube no longer shows you every video that a channel uploads even if you are subscribed, and the experimentation by Twitter is leading its users in the same direction.  Twitter has already been inserting tweets into your timeline based on the activity of others, tweets which are liked or it thinks might be relevant to you are inserted into the feed - this was a major point of contention for many.  By going further and inserting content into your timeline from sources you aren't even interested in at all, Twitter is effectively breaking the entire functionality of its site.  In other words the product no longer does what it said it did in the advertisement.

Younger users have already been leaving Twitter for other social networks.  Those that remain are people who have been on Twitter for some time or have a vested interest in using the platform.  By reducing the functionality of that platform you will further drive away users as even those with vested interests will realise that the platform is no longer fit for purpose when it doesn't do what you need it to do.

The ultimate issue here is that Twitter, and YouTube, and other tech companies are now ignoring their users to the point where their pursuit of revenue has compromised the integrity of the product they were selling in the first place.  This is like a farmer paying so little attention to his crops and no attention at all to what his customers want to buy, ultimately there will come a point where customers will leave and you will be left with a mountain of produce that you can't sell and you will pay the price for it.

Twitter and many other tech platforms are resource hungry and require a lot of infrastructure to support them, in the form of data centres etc.  Those are not assets that are easy to dispose of and very few people would want to buy.  If Twitter and other tech companies like it have to downsize their operations, quite a few of them will find that incredibly difficult to do.  Their expansions were made with the belief that growth would continue and no thought was made of the possibility that they would have to deal with shrinkage too.

Twitter is on the brink of becoming another MySpace, a website that we look back on that was popular for what seemed like forever, which we didn't imagine going away, and yet we realise we've not used it in 10+ years because of the stupidity of those who ran it making decisions that took away each and every reason why people actually used it in the first place.

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