Twitter’s Salvation is Staring it Right in the Face

Where were you when Kanye West torched Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose exposed Mr. West?

Where were you when Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca brought the knives out for Paul Graham for his comments about Shark Tank?

And Where were you when the intellectual bout between B.O.B. and Neil DeGrasse Tyson turned into a rap battle and ended with a mic drop?

Guess where all of this started? On Twitter. Where did most people experience all of this well informed discourse? Not Twitter.

I was there all week and was only tipped off about these beefs from Reddit and YouTube. There were countless articles, memes, and TV segments all about a few tweets. Twitter isn’t just sharing news anymore like Facebook, it’s becoming the news. It’s creating enormous entertainment value, it’s just doing a terrible job capturing more of that value for itself.

The truth is, Twitter isn’t really the best place to see the best tweets. I was there for the great Kanye tweetstorm of Jan 27th, 2016, but could only make sense of it from a Complex article. Same thing with the Drake and Meek Mill blowup of 2015. Imgurians constantly post screenshots from what’s been dubbed “Black Twitter” that constantly gets upvoted. Clearly Twitter has something that people still want and enjoy.

How can one partake in all that Twitter has to offer? Well you can search, jump around feeds trying to figure out the story, and hope that nothing gets deleted before you see it. However, if you’re not following a specific user or using Twitter at a specific time you’ll miss out. Or you can wait until people collect and post screenshots of all the goods to your goto social platform. For the average internet user the choice is clear.

So how can the golden goose of social media get its groove back? Make it easier for people to experience all the great content on Twitter, on Twitter. Build a drag n’ drop tool for users to create collections of tweets that share the full story. Let old and especially new users follow categories (Taylor Swift, Star Wars, 2016 US Election) like they follow users.

Most of all, send me notifications when s*** hits the fan. Hell, turn that into a new product called “Beef” that shows you all the fights and mean tweets people send. Do something, anything but disappear and leave the internet devoid of the siliness and spats that we crave so much.

And of course, more memes please.